Paperweight Poetry

I have not learned yet how to swallow pills any other way but one by one; but I am learning. I am learning ways to catch up with the world, to make a firefly pass through the eye of a needle, to shrink myself like old peach skin to fit, to stop rinsing off the sunrise-flesh flecked pit and pocketing it in my dress. I am finding ways like I will always find ways to get my toast out of the toaster without burning my fingers; but sometimes the ways are like gravel in my shoe, for it's hard to be soft like vein like stringed squash in a body of bone. So I stopped taping old books back together and yesterday, my brother tossed me in a pool when I didn't know how to swim; and I didn't drown. -anna sluder

I am not a library book and you are not a child collecting a stamp collection in the pages of me, to hand-off to your friends like a football in the virtual pixels of your fantasy league, and cross me off your bracket with the easiness of devouring a six pack during Shark Week. I am not a sword for you to swallow a white whale, a circus act for you to master. I am not bread for you to burn the edges of, and feed me to the ducks because i could not be groomed palatable enough for your consumption. I am not your blood bank, not your goth girlfriend to suck the neck of  like a teenage vampire romance not the universal donor to your every need, the feeding tube, the surgeon, and the wound that you complain about. I am not your edgy, carries a lighter but doesn't smoke soul-fixer to teach you the term socialism off of a flash card. I will not peel you open gently like a papaya, to expose the fleshy and soft parts of you to the world and sit on my knees like a quiet catho...