Paperweight Poetry

There are things that I wish to say,  rotting away in my throat, every day that I do not let them utter their cries, I can taste them slick down my throat,  like an oil sticking and gripping like black mold  floating in a bathtub of basin water already gone cold and every word i say and add and collect  like a museum curator, strikes its match  at the end of my tongue, on the serrated edge of each word and sets this bleak ocean on fire, laughing  in its gloriously orange irony so many words, too many damn feelings, I wish I were an enchanted doll,  pinned and plucked and perfect, placed politely in a glass box for all of eternity,  keep me innocent, small, untaught like strings that don’t know how to knot, because experience only teaches you how to make more fires, with ways other than incomplete sentences and peppered matches, so which agony is worse?  to tell and kill? or to tell and die?  eit...

My collarbones are my wings they curve with the poise of the sea, white as the foam of its waves these flightless pinions of mine. It is as if we were once creatures purposed for a sky and our wings were sprouting and then they stopped short rounded off into shoulders but I will not let my skin and bones be an excuse for my lack of flight, these are my collarbones, they are powerful, they collect raindrops and moonbeams shaking with laughter and surprise they are sacrificial soldiers breaking in half with the grace of bread broken at communion so that it doesn't break my heart instead, my collarbones are my wings, and they are fearsome, they kiss the tips of my hair and freckled skin like stars, glistening like swords poking out of my chest, daring only the bravest to near, they perch and pitch and rise like silent suns without names, eddies of rose these are my collarbones, they will not yield, they will not part, like the feelings of secondary characters,...

I don't know if you've ever seen something absolutely free, it's a rarity in any society, but it looks like a bird that flies, for the pure rapture of using its wings. -anna sluder

It was my childhood that made me old, by the time I was seventeen I was digging up ungodly memories that not even a forty year old would open from their time capsule because even they haven't lived that much you see, I was a flower that grew where it wasn't supposed to like an anachronistic telephone booth in the Middle Ages and then even an anachronistic telephone booth in the twenty first century, maybe I never belonged and maybe that's okay, if belonging is owning but that doesn't mean i was a library book shuffled between the fingers and beds of strangers a thing, anyone could take with a free library card but they did anyways, And they tell you, you, the flowers that grew where they were supposed to in the wombs of mothers who wanted them, in the suburban neighborhoods with potted plants next door to the gentrified coffee shop that uses the same Miracle-Grow, that the system is reassuring words like, safe and secure, they don't tell you t...

I have written you in my heart with my own blood, and not even OxiClean can get you out. -anna sluder

The fluorescent light over my head twitches and hums like a bug, and beside me an abstrusely thin line of water, patters down into the imposturous porcelain bathtub beside me, just enough to be able to circle around the drain and wane away like an exhaling chest, I think of turning the faucet so that it creaks and groans as it closes like muscles that are too tight to move, it must've been left open a little all night, but I know that the unwelcoming metal will dig into my hand, and the ligaments and tissues of my palm will burn and stretch like plastic in a fire, so I do not move. The girl waddles in, bare feet slapping the gashed tile, the light prattles on, twittering like someone had asked it to sing vibrato, it is inconsolable. She squats on the toilet in front of me without concern, unaware of her own bravery, the fat in her thighs smashed onto the porcelain spreads out like butter, she doesn't mind, she scrunches up her face, clenching her toes, small, sof...

Maybe I'll write a poem. And maybe it will rhyme, and it will be all about the trenches of time, and when you read it, it will sound like wind chimes, and maybe someone on a street table, will sell it to you for a dime, because your wife likes romantics but she'll know it isn't yours, and the fact that you thought she would is your biggest crime, so maybe you'll sit down with a pencil and pretend, that you're some poet as you drink whiskey and lime, but you'll only pour a bottle of black ink over your words, a failure as much as a talking mime, shoving the drenched paper into her hands, whispering that you're only sorry that you couldn't get it to rhyme. -anna sluder