Paperweight Poetry

I find myself like an aimless child running my hands along these walls like a guitar pick against its strings I walk for sixty-five miles and then maybe more. I pass the children's dreams along the way bobbing like bodiless fish heads, the children's fists striking the stone like suns against skies, their dreams drift along the walls like a baby in a basket straying down a river. It's mother cries, "Live. Live!", but the children cry, "To die. To die!" We set our people free with only our dreams, we are sad, and we are good, and we lie in the earth, build bridges with our backs so that our children may reach the walls with the smallest of voices in one hand and a fistful of river water in another. "Live. Live!" the mothers cry, the children's fists bleed river water, baptizes the wall in their mother's sacrifice. And a singular voice rises like the dust of all those that came before, "To die. To die." -anna ...

I want to speak into the wind, ask him if he gets lonely too, and if maybe he'd come by for drinks some time? See, I have this theory, everyone's lonely. -anna sluder

I am haunted by spaces, the space between human connection and the lack of it, the space between this life and my past one, the space between my strides where the earth goes untouched, all these spaces, I wonder if they are happier than me, or if they are just as forlorn, widowed by the dark like shadows that only riddle the world by light, I yearn in this friendless chasm of simultaneous immoderation and deficit for the spaces to notice the spaces they skip, and find me there and love me too. -anna sluder

Meet me in the garden between my anguish and God’s, in the soft spaces where the flowers grow, and the soft spaces where they die; and, recognize me. Collect and recollect all of the parts of me that I don’t, and with characteristic immoderation, be dramatic, write them all down into poems and tuck them in the soft spaces, paint them onto your back and then slice it off and hang it on a wall and call it art.  Meet me in the garden between your chest and mine, and call me by your name, then maybe I’ll recognize me too. -anna sluder

My people are not nothing, we were just knocking on the doors of politicians’ souls that put up their “do not disturb” sign long ago. My people, did everything we could, we walked out of schools, took to the streets, and screamed, and whispered, we came with signs and only our hearts in our hands and one single voice. We wrote out a fill-in-the-blank bill to save lives, written in our very own blood, carved it in our backs, and promised all you’d have to do is sign. My people are something, my people are everything. We carry Mother Earth on our backs, to keep her orbiting around the sun, like a child sent to war, burying his brother alone, because their parents wouldn’t fight; instead they sat at home, stirring their cups of tea and calling us: too ignorant, too selfish, too young to understand. But, oh mama, though I have only two decades worth of tally-marks in my book, I have lived hundreds of years. My people. The sun-orbiters and earth-carriers, ...

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