Paperweight Poetry

T here is so much room here in my chest for you; My mother told me to vacuum before my guest arrives but instead I grew sunflower fields along my veins because I knew your heart, because when I told you I had butterflies in my stomach, you cried, and said we had to get them out right now for they could still be alive. There is so much room here in my chest for you; My mother told me to dust off the shelves and the tables but instead I directed rivers to flow through the spaces between my ribs so you could have a place to swim. I have made an inn that does not run out of space for you, there are hundreds of rooms in my chest for you to lay your head, all brimming with butterflies, I just hope you don’t mind. -anna sluder

I have been swallowing dragon eggshells for ever since I could remember; collecting their vacated hulls in the pockets of my dress, immersing my hands in spumous water to gently purge them clean, lining them up like a rock collection along the sills; and with a jade stone, grinding them to dust, snorting them up like a tonic of all the things I wasn’t; agitating them into the mashed potatoes and spoon-feeding it to the ulcer in my side that screamed when it’s drug ran dry. But today, I do not find new ways to clean, break, and cook dragon eggshells, I do not find new ways to swallow them; today, I cease trying to become the thing I am not, and become the thing that I am; I line up the dragon eggs like God lined the mountains along the horizon, I command the dragons to life like a director commands a thousand voices to rise, and they all call me by my name: mother, mother, mother. -anna slude

I draw my pale thoughts over my head like a blanket and wonder if the discomfiture ever gets softer on the heart see I've learned why the heart beats against the chest wall, it is a war drum on the front lines of my thoughts the harbinger before the marching towards the skin and the vessels and the hair. at first, I wanted my skin to stretch like the tendon of a blue sea to make room for all of the ache, but now I want to be small, to shrink and slip through the eye of an needle and take less space and air than everyone else in the room I dream of being the first atom to split; of being swallowed by a beach pelican, and spat out like tiny fish bones he couldn't devour; there are so many unfinished poems in my chest, I'd like to think my body is an unfinished poem that I am writing, and that one day maybe not every poem will be about my body, but they will be about the mountains and rivers I command to rise in the softest parts of me; I hope you are commandi