Paperweight Poetry

There is something sadistic and untimely in the puppeteer who draws the lines under my eyes and with the gesture of the hand, forces me to cry. but at least she details the subtle pathos of the soft skin under the eye, in the wale-like bulges of each diminutive vein that rise like a loose thread in the yeast of a soft bruise bread. my cheekbones lick up the tears like a wolf to its own spew and i run my tongue around the silver cross on a chain, my tears, these unholy waters, bring prayers to every place but the pews. the lips part and the skin reddens, like an allergy to its own sorrow, the eyes fall as the flames go softer, softer, softer and the artist kneels at the altar, alone, and prays for tomorrow. -anna sluder

When was the last time that you cried? that you carried jars of tears in your clenched hands, knuckles white like the moons that you sacrifice your tears to. when was the last time that you broke? like truly broke into something as lilliputian as breadcrumbs, that the lions in your heart followed until they met the wolves in your mind. did you know that there is eighteen inches between your head and your heart? when was the last time that you laughed? roared until your body could not entrammel that intemperate energy and your lips cracked from smiles too vast and eyes overrun because there are some feelings that human confines cannot express and that is the mysterious place where people travel to in their dreams and where people who die from broken hearts go to after death. Sometimes I forget to feel, the world is so ravaged by noise, noise picking the last bits of meat off of every bone it leaves nothing, even for the child who prays to the ceiling for a spell of sile...

Leave stones along the places where you hurt me so I know exactly where you broke my heart I want a trail of bread-fucking-crumbs, leave your staff in the exact place where you parted that godless sea. Maybe I'll turn some David Bowie on my Walkman and I'll follow that path back one day; skip from heart break to heart break from each gold fleck of the iris to the next, and I'll gather these stones, sling them over my back like slaughtered prey, and with the confidence of any white middle-aged man with a mediocre-sized dick, I build my own fucking mountain on which to stand. -anna sluder

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