Paperweight Poetry

You can't say there isn't beauty in broken things Until after you have seen crushed shells mollified to sand Until after you've seen tears splatter in sweet pangs And felt the separating space between the fingers on a hand For mosaics are made of fractured glass And a sky split open by the branches of a tree Just as the earth cracks into blades of grass  Are just a few of the things you can see That are as beautiful as the things that are whole  So don't tell me that beauty in broken things isn't true Because then there wouldn't be you.  -anna sluder

The Wild drags me by locks of hair, tresses and scalp oozing  Scoffing me from my corner he seizes me out out out  Out of my chest out of the warmth and into the icy white light Like a turbulent current of wind and sun  Pulsing against each other, warmth fighting frigidity  Fingertips dug into the ridged wallpaper of my throat  The Wild convulses me over and over until I am quaking and ticking  Like a broken clock throbbing irregularly out of time On the floor  The gong surging back and forth clacking noisily  Even those it is not the end of the hour  Even those his hands are already gone But the Wild is a ghost, the swelling opaque breath against the night  The night not just as a time but an absence of light a place and a feeling Drawing me not so kindly out  Out of myself until I am howling From the Wild inside.  -anna sluder

They tell us to duck and cover our heads As we hear tree branches swatting against the sky Brace yourself they tell us, as we hear the sky quiver its trembling lip Yet lightning and fire never arrive  Just an estranged rumble of thunder humming between our bodies The rattling of bones.  -anna sluder

My life is a fleeting mirage  For I am seen only when  The light glances the water just right  Under the maddening moonlight and the men  My life is the futile painting  Of too thin lips and sunken cheeks  With rosy varnish and cultures rouge  For every minute of every day of every week  I am an ephemeral name  To with every inferior I enslave That they should have the combined syllables such as I  Even when I cannot take it to the grave  I am the trivial dress in which I wear  That flounces about when I spin  As it comes to be too much a part of me For it has been sewn into my skin  So when it comes to my reflection in the mirror  It seems that I am no more than that I fear.  -anna sluder

You scold me when I forget to clean up You curse me when the house has a flood You dam me because you fall from the pool by my feet But don't you see you're slipping in a puddle of my blood? -anna sluder

Sleep wake Her legs gnarled within themselves like a twisted tree trunk in the middle of the hallway at school Sleep wake And people whirl by like leaves caught in a vortex of hurricanes Sleep wake So the lovers carve their names into her stomach, sap oozing out Sleep wak So the rednecks pockmark her with bullets for target practice Sleep wa So the popular girls crack her arms, climbing her to get ahead, Sleep w So the jocks chop and carry her for weight training before the football game Sleep And the geeks slice her into thin paper to carry the heft of their equations Sleep Sleep -anna sluder

in the broth of morning light of the morning sun the facade of night ebbs away as the stars gnaw upon their lips stretch and crane their necks to see and to stay but they drop like bullet shells clanking to the ground, those stars, and the sky thrusts its torch onward to the battlefield and the broth of morning light of morning sun stirs and broils with the fallen souls of thousands of stars. -anna sluder