Paperweight Poetry

We drink up half a mind gargle on it like mouthwash just to spit it back out. He calls you a tease but so is he, we are all shaking, for if thunder is a show, we all have to be; dark water dribbles over our lips, scholars call them fallacies, but we call this normal, as if normal is safety pins closing our cleavage and gaps, as if normal is anything other than a dryer setting, and here in a world with guises and surmises vinegar tastes like an 'I don't know' so they defend to their deaths thoughts that are only guesses; I dream of a world where people say what they feel, where it's okay to not be okay, because she's not okay, and maybe you aren't either, so drink me up, drink up all of my mind and all I have to say, and tell me something real, even if it's just the silence. -anna sluder

Seventeen year old love is like a cult, it is you slipping your hand under my shirt, whispering that you’re just undoing my bra as you grope my ribcage, plucking each rib out, for its easier than just asking for my heart, you wrap my breast tissue around and around your fingers  like avarice spinning straw into gold, you tie each of my ribs together with it and use as a ladder to climb up to my heart, payback for the one less rib you have,  that for some reason it inclines you to believe  that sacrifice equals debt, that your ancestors’ kindness is just another way to own me, your fingers run like confused rain up my aorta, and watch as I shake without consent. I loved you and then you played cat’s cradle with my heartstrings;  seventeen year old love is a cult and you’re a master manipulator,  a lunatic who watched a youtube tutorial on  how to become a sage, and taught me that nice girl means easy, nice girl does...

Clean, clean, clean is the hospital in my mouth with its starch, square gowns, unforgiving off-white floors that stiffen your feet that were once so accepted in your bed like a tundra spoon on a wet warm tongue things that sound like construction tools graze my cheeks and rubber fingers, artificial on my teeth. Noises are so different for me now; mirages, that sound like a hybrid of a buzz saw and a hatchet, but really they make me clean, clean, clean but maybe I want to be crooked, maybe I want yellow and black piano keys rotting ivory, decayed by laughter and life gaps as wide as parking spaces maybe I want to be everything you don’t want. Because noises are so different now; the people are so different now they’re all clean, clean, clean. -anna sluder

The ground beneath my feet is what you said you'd be, tenacious and unable to shake, but you aren't a god, and words are just drops of a thought, promises, just a vague memory of hope, so I have much to fear and much to deny if you swear you are my ground that doesn't break especially if you haven't heard of an earthquake and the humanity that will only ever get to try. For everything constant is always a lie. -anna sluder

People talk and talk and talk and they rarely ever say anything worth the hands of a clock;  one time i saw a man who wore Italian shoes  who carried a pink umbrella even when it didn’t rain and rambled of a time where men sang blues, and one time he looked at me and stirred his tea, he said that money really can buy happiness, I told him, but sunsets are free.  -anna sluder

My mind is uncertain waves and lonely tides  that ebb and rise and die, and there are sirens dressed as lifeguards, and they are my thoughts like blue mermaid hair that swallow and plunge and mock for they don’t know how to swim, and no one cared to wonder, why they always stayed on the rocks; and there are trembling buoys in the waves, red boxing gloves chained from the ground, and they are my thoughts, and they can only last so many rounds;  But how the ocean lets me slice into its tissue, squeeze through the gash when it is vulnerable, when the tide pulls back,  and swim in its belly, I will never know; so there are good things too, in between the pleats of mind and thought, in between siren and sea, and perhaps there is insanity, or perhaps there is just me.  -anna sluder

There are people with names and faces and friends and places  that shout words at me, vaguely in my vicinity  because I am a dandelion seed still wavering between realms,  caught in the wind, unable to land,  like a plastic bag entangled in a branch, for I am oblivious to where I belong,  perhaps there isn’t a place for me yet, and I’m okay with that, I know, that the world owes me nothing,  but you shout words at the vagabonding void I am, give my friends and I a name that we didn’t choose, if people agree that words are guns, you might as well have called us gooks. You shake your head and waggle your finger  like a big god smoking a pipe, calling me, smart-ass slack fuck politically correct entitled shit  that kills everything from the cereal industry to the White House budget  Oh, and don’t forget,  netflix-binging technology possessed orange face socially awkward bitch spineless selfie-takin...