Paperweight Poetry

I vehemently believe that eyelashes are the softest part of the self, that they kiss moonlight while we sleep; that each one lost, finds itself a river to voyage down. I sometimes wonder if eyelashes disintegrate, or if your grave was pried open like a can of tuna, would your eyelashes rest on your bones? They skim my cheekbones like an intrusive finger swiping the foam around the cup of a café latte and I know they are like miniscule ants who can sustain the weight ten times their own and I know that on my eyelashes rests the universe, that it is on my eyelashes that the sun chooses to set instead of the horizon and they do not burn. -anna sluder

My voice is stretched thin like peach skin that splits open at the sight of teeth, I think of our bodies like a plural form of the infant Moses roving down the soft plateaus and dipping down caves of water, of river. Yet I know I cannot palliate the offense with the sentimentalizing of the medium that which carries it; nothing can abate the way that men can discern another person as nothing but the skin that delineates it, the way they take stance upon our spines, spurring us down the river with their clubs, wood carved out of our mother’s bellies, swallowed by men, digested, until apathetic they spat us back out a shivering, cyanotic baby born, a baby born too old, knowing too great of ache before its first birthday; the finger to the lips, the written notes, in that moment of realizing the society is dystopic. I know we are precisely bodies to them, peach skins with the root dug out, bobbing like fishing tassels down the river, they do not know the weight of our