Paperweight Poetry

I have not learned yet how to swallow pills any other way but one by one; but I am learning. I am learning ways to catch up with the world, to make a firefly pass through the eye of a needle, to shrink myself like old peach skin to fit, to stop rinsing off the sunrise-flesh flecked pit and pocketing it in my dress. I am finding ways like I will always find ways to get my toast out of the toaster without burning my fingers; but sometimes the ways are like gravel in my shoe, for it's hard to be soft like vein like stringed squash in a body of bone. So I stopped taping old books back together and yesterday, my brother tossed me in a pool when I didn't know how to swim; and I didn't drown. -anna sluder

I am not a library book and you are not a child collecting a stamp collection in the pages of me, to hand-off to your friends like a football in the virtual pixels of your fantasy league, and cross me off your bracket with the easiness of devouring a six pack during Shark Week. I am not a sword for you to swallow a white whale, a circus act for you to master. I am not bread for you to burn the edges of, and feed me to the ducks because i could not be groomed palatable enough for your consumption. I am not your blood bank, not your goth girlfriend to suck the neck of  like a teenage vampire romance not the universal donor to your every need, the feeding tube, the surgeon, and the wound that you complain about. I am not your edgy, carries a lighter but doesn't smoke soul-fixer to teach you the term socialism off of a flash card. I will not peel you open gently like a papaya, to expose the fleshy and soft parts of you to the world and sit on my knees like a quiet catho...

There are bathroom stalls for hearts who are lonely teenage girls eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches on the toilets at 1pm knees pressed gently together, like a preserved flower under glass sweat, peanut butter, and ennui is the glue even God believes the female heart is a delicate fucking flower that's why he made bathroom stalls the glass but the bathrooms have no air conditioning and the peanut butter sticks to the roof of my mouth and the girl with the triangle for a dress on the door makes sure my knees stay together so i cannot walk but stay a tactfully pinned butterfly, take a little here, pull a little there, sometimes i wish the drowsily drawn eyeliner wings that i copied from an issue of Cosmo would stretch out and carry me away but instead i am a complacent dog with an electric fence at the age of thirty yes girl, good girl, stay young, good girl, stay beautiful, good girl. There are bathroom stalls for hearts who are lonely teenage girls eating ...

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 ...