Paperweight Poetry

Here's to being a single virgin and buying lingerie, I did it for myself, I did it for the familiar feeling of freshly shaven legs between the sheets, extensions of the moon's light tucked between the black wuthering silk of the sky. Here's to my mother condemning me for the satin g-string and here's to me wearing it anyways, it's for the lonely nights and the celebrating with my friends nights. Here's to me wearing a bustier and garters and eating not one but two pints of icecream as I binge watch Game of Thrones. Here's to loud women, quiet women, single and taken women, black, Latina, native, and white, here's to all women, women who wear lingerie and those who do not, and here's to not giving a fuck. -anna sluder

in my wildest fantasies, I stand in a river, without a glance of mistrust towards where my feet stand, to the enigmatic inky place my eyes cannot see, the literal heart of darkness in which I stand is not the stuff of macrabe alleys and ominous streets, it is the stuff of the universe, a floating pinprick in the bending of space, i am infinite and despite this otherworldly feeling, i feel solace in the solidarity of the water and the mystical forces that move it. -anna sluder

Imperceptible, am I. I ordered the same drink at the same coffee shop I go to every day, my drink order has evanesced like a ghost thin and pale as the skin over milk nine times in the past month, no receipt of my desire, no recollection of my face or my name, no proof that I ever wanted anything. Occult, am I Invisible to the law of attraction, a grey matted fur cat slinking through cardboard boxes and pipes drinking gutter water, I wait and I wait, like abdication on the street like a blind date where they really are blind, to me.   Vaporous, am I I sit and swallow, and swallow, and swallow bite after bite to finish my plate that I didn’t fill, and then one night I stand and let my fist reconcile its feelings with the wall, and the soft skin over my knuckles busts open like corset buttons, like a debutante that couldn’t take the pressure, and the girl in the next room over, knocks back, and asks for me to stop, and I say sure and silently clean t...

I thought that I wrote poetry because I was hurt, But now I am marred and small and I cannot remember how to hold a pen, my hand isn't disfigured, but there's a hairline crack in my mind, like the adiposity of life has sat quietly rocking in the same chair for years and they cannot quite call the hinges broken, but it certainly has a pressure fracture as immortal things do to mortal things, I am unsure of how to press the pen down like a knife to a wrist and let the whole world bleed, I cannot find words to let seep across blue lines like blood cells in a vein. I thought I wrote poems because I was hurt, but instead I wrote them because I was alive, and now I am marred and small and I cannot write my name let alone write a poem, I cannot eat a sandwich, chew and masticate particles in my mouth and squeeze it down a muscular tube, I cannot lay my head on a pillow, be still and alone with my thoughts, I cannot write a poem, unless you call this a poem, Then sure I ca...

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...