Paperweight Poetry

Tell me why the world cracks open my soul as if I had more than one, and tosses it like a peanut shell unto the floor, tell me why I can’t be angry at the horizon for being an imaginary line that recedes as I get closer to it, just because it’s beautiful, just because I’m a woman. Sometimes, no, every day I pray that God is a woman, the sun and moon her breasts, the clothed trees her pubic hair, maybe then men would quit telling women to shave; if God was a woman I’d be free. Like the stars bow before God, men would bow before me instead of slaughtering me. People with blood, bone, and beating chests tell me women are not oppressed, but my voice trips over my soul of littered peanut shells spat out by the tongues of men, I want to tell them about the bodies in bushes, the holes we have between our legs that we didn’t ask to be filled, I want to tell them, about the bodies, but they are everywhere; they are in my throat, in my fingertips, there...

Why do I write? Because putting my hand on the blank chest of two pages bound by a spine and daring to add something to it is like touching God. -anna sluder

She clutched grey pigeon eggs between her ivory teeth, It was a curious balancing act that smelled of lion jaws and sunflower seeds, Her eyes held the volume of a gravedigger digging his first grave, they were sullen like whale bones sucked up upon the shore, and acid-yellow. A soulful tear seared out of the temple-corner of each eye, making a V-shape down her face like a following of birds filing home; it reminded her of the first time she heard jazz, that the world was so lonely that we had to invent beautiful things to fill it with. Her jaw rattled like an open window falling shut during an earthquake, some spindly acrobat had broke a leg and been dragged and left in some lonesome corner; All the while worry had been spread thin and hardened across her body like a cheesecake glaze, her facial muscles like wet clothes pinned up under her eyes. She couldn't crush them. Her mind too fluttery with the thought of their bird-mother squawking like some acrobat in a lon...

This is an anthem to any person who ever felt small; I see you. I hear your silence loud and clear like the church bell that forgets to ring, you and I, the ones who have been tightened and flattened and rolled into a ball like the notebook fringe between sweaty child fingers, who have felt as nuisance as jars of flitting paper chads, we are as big and as beautiful as the dawn. But if it takes you awhile to see yourself as the sun sees morning dew, then I will tell you this, to any person who ever felt small; I see you and we'll be small together. -anna sluder 

I was dark and so we ran, wearing only white socks that circled around my ankles like whirlpools, I'm scared of how fast days seemingly slip by like water like how you know a river by its name forgetting that it only ever once was a few raindrops because you believe raindrops are different from rivers that life is the same as daydreams. I fear that I have sewn memories I cannot remember with patches of fiction because anything is better than a thousand abysses in my mind, like instrumentals between the words, I am here for the words, some are here for the music, but we are running in white socks on brown paste slopes and I need words, the raindrops and not the rivers to tell me what is real. -anna sluder

One of these days I'm going to stop being afraid of roads other than mine that lead to the same place, and maybe that day will be today, or maybe it will be the day that the tigers get me, and I won't know if they come to bare their teeth or if they come to lead me, and I don't think I care. -anna sluder

Bad poetry in a breakroom, semi colons and tuna fish sandwiches as allies, what do I know about life? Nothing. But maybe that's the same thing as knowing everything about it, I've written psalms on palms and wondered if watercolor came from a plane full of paint diving into a river; Rivers, phantoms with blue pants. What do I know about life? Nothing. Which is the same thing as knowing everything. Babes introduced into cold air with cold hands that snip umbilical cords, know just as much as persons pocked in unkept promises and hearts gutted like fish, they know just as much as the rivers. Because babes are later dressed as thirty-minute bad poets in the breakroom, phantoms wearing blue pants and a hard hat, I used to have dreams, and this is what they have come to, scrabble and cold coffee, and maybe my ideology is just as short as lightning in a window, but just maybe I'm alive and maybe that means something. -anna sluder