Paperweight Poetry

Today we tell our body dysmorphia to stuff it, today we drink that water and send those emails and pay those bills, today we remember that we are not our past that every breath we breathe is one big cosmic fuck you to our abusers,  that every hair we grow, every skin cell,  every new freckle is something that your abuser has never touched, that we are growing sunflower fields of bravery for no one else but ourselves,  that loving ourselves may be our greatest cross to bear but it will be our greatest opus today we remind ourselves that it's okay if the only thing you did today was breathe  even when we live in a capitalistic society that equates our productivity to our worth,  for nothing owns this soul, this body, but ourselves.  Today, we accept our sensitivity as our magic to wield and not our undoing, today is a good day because today is the day we tell ourselves "I love you"  or maybe today is the day that we don't tell ...

But the earth is bleeding and her limbs are so blue all i can think that's left that i can do, is sing; for i am convinced that when God scraped his fingers across the universe and folded the earth together like origami cranes from the scraps of stars and sunlight that he gathered under his fingernails that he sang, that he sang the blues like Muddy Waters and the earth, she breathed her first and came alive to the sound of song and so when she dies, she should taste the same honey that pours from the mouths of blues singers, except no one is here but me, God has even left, and I don't know the blues. So I stroke her rivers and I pat the summits of her mountains and I sing the only song I know, Etta James' "At Last" and she swallows us whole. -anna sluder

I never realized how short is the space between my jaw and my temple,  I wonder, is it small for you there too?  I wonder how many flowers I could grow along its border, plant the seeds in the gums of my teeth and watch for what happens when I am left in the sun; but the space and its flowers I thought immaculate  you ground into fine particles of dust and snorted up, got high off of the fault lines of me.  I am in a Volvo on dry land and the Volvo is filling up with water  from some unsung genesis,  and you stand on the outside, watching me die against the ceiling, I didn't know ceilings could get so dirty, so stained,  even God can forget to clean, I suppose. I am what the poets call a beautiful tragedy,  they call me that with a cigarette in one hand and their cock in the other, they give pseudo-intellectual speeches for awards and my tragedy is enough to finance their drinking problem for several years. When I th...

T here is so much room here in my chest for you; My mother told me to vacuum before my guest arrives but instead I grew sunflower fields along my veins because I knew your heart, because when I told you I had butterflies in my stomach, you cried, and said we had to get them out right now for they could still be alive. There is so much room here in my chest for you; My mother told me to dust off the shelves and the tables but instead I directed rivers to flow through the spaces between my ribs so you could have a place to swim. I have made an inn that does not run out of space for you, there are hundreds of rooms in my chest for you to lay your head, all brimming with butterflies, I just hope you don’t mind. -anna sluder

I have been swallowing dragon eggshells for ever since I could remember; collecting their vacated hulls in the pockets of my dress, immersing my hands in spumous water to gently purge them clean, lining them up like a rock collection along the sills; and with a jade stone, grinding them to dust, snorting them up like a tonic of all the things I wasn’t; agitating them into the mashed potatoes and spoon-feeding it to the ulcer in my side that screamed when it’s drug ran dry. But today, I do not find new ways to clean, break, and cook dragon eggshells, I do not find new ways to swallow them; today, I cease trying to become the thing I am not, and become the thing that I am; I line up the dragon eggs like God lined the mountains along the horizon, I command the dragons to life like a director commands a thousand voices to rise, and they all call me by my name: mother, mother, mother. -anna slude...

I draw my pale thoughts over my head like a blanket and wonder if the discomfiture ever gets softer on the heart see I've learned why the heart beats against the chest wall, it is a war drum on the front lines of my thoughts the harbinger before the marching towards the skin and the vessels and the hair. at first, I wanted my skin to stretch like the tendon of a blue sea to make room for all of the ache, but now I want to be small, to shrink and slip through the eye of an needle and take less space and air than everyone else in the room I dream of being the first atom to split; of being swallowed by a beach pelican, and spat out like tiny fish bones he couldn't devour; there are so many unfinished poems in my chest, I'd like to think my body is an unfinished poem that I am writing, and that one day maybe not every poem will be about my body, but they will be about the mountains and rivers I command to rise in the softest parts of me; I hope you are commandi...

I vehemently believe that eyelashes are the softest part of the self, that they kiss moonlight while we sleep; that each one lost, finds itself a river to voyage down. I sometimes wonder if eyelashes disintegrate, or if your grave was pried open like a can of tuna, would your eyelashes rest on your bones? They skim my cheekbones like an intrusive finger swiping the foam around the cup of a café latte and I know they are like miniscule ants who can sustain the weight ten times their own and I know that on my eyelashes rests the universe, that it is on my eyelashes that the sun chooses to set instead of the horizon and they do not burn. -anna sluder