Paperweight Poetry

Would you drop the stars just to hold my hand? -anna sluder

Don't tell me to be realistic When you are chained to logic And I am chained to the stars.  -anna sluder

I know where to name my ache It is exactly three quarters of an inch  Below my fifth rib on the right side,  Diaganol from my belly button  And symmetrically in line with my left arm The pain isn't surface level, or in one place  It is systemically clawing across my muscles And into every one of my organs Lighting a fire in my bones But yet it all comes from the same place Below my fifth rib, on the right side The place where you lay your head.  -anna sluder

I used to count the stars like the way you count your teeth One finger pressed to a tooth, one finger to the sky Hopping from one to the next  But here transfixed under the sky  I don't count stars the same way I count teeth Because now I don't even try.  -anna sluder

Remember that song that you wrote for me? That had a lovely little melody and I sang the harmony to in the last part? Well I heard it resounding as my chest began to crack For our song was the sound of you breaking my heart.  -anna sluder

Yellow wet faces with yellow wet mouths Squawk open like birds beaks screaming  And fluttering against the sides of the cage from the outside Pecking at the flesh and juice trapped inside of it  Cheering as blood cataracts like red wine over lips And their coaches drench them soaking the blood pink Diluting the violence as not that bad with a bottle of water dripping down their scalp Come on man, get up there, keep your hands up Make your own knuckles bleed just to make another man bleed Until his skull only a fourth of an inch thick rattles back and forth  Like a bobblehead breaking  And the lightning pumps through their fists  Flashing in synchrony to the camera clicks And he screams through the retching of blood  As the other man carves into his chest like the carcass of cow meat And the birds flicker and squelch  As his body chokes on bruises and ruptured veins  Life contorting into misshapen angles as thunder...

Maybe pressing my foot down on the accelerator Until the world whizzes by like a merry-go-round And the streetlights crinkle up like yellow origami flowers And the wind whirs like a whine in between the motherly arms of the trees Is my way of screaming in a world intolerant to noise  And anything louder than monotony  And there is machine and man breaking the boundaries of ground and air Like cracks spreading across a frozen lake As we fracture open the road as an earthquake And all we can taste is carbonized breaths cold against the night And air swims into the open windows like an ocean filling a drowning car But instead it's making us fly And as our arms flap like pigeon bird wings out the window Gravel spitting out of coils of rubber on a late night city drive Wondering if this is it If this is the moment we feel most alive.  -anna sluder