Origami Microchap

Selected Poem(s) 

STILL I RISE

 Click title to open microchap

Cover design by JanK

•

The Width of a Room

In this narrow house
a slight grip, a gentle hold

& the trembling of glass—
circles of sadness

to shine, to hide, to cross
from the only window.

Failure comes crashing
within reach

of future mistakes,
& even darkness has arms.

Kitsungi

this bowl can still be repaired
even if it seems broken

irredeemably,
even if its pieces

have been trodden underfoot,
further ground down

in an effort to recover
the fragments,

the edges jigsawed together
to align again—

to simply embrace the cracks
that remain,

filling them with something
like hope.

Still I Rise

The clouds are like nothing else—
bold explosions & everywhere.
They’re long & colossal.
Beauty is breathing above me.

I am beauty with two feet,
a name, experiences,
life in stretches, place distilled.
The beauty is glowing

as ingot, steel & glass,
a ceiling blazing gold—everything
I can feel. I center myself
against the earth,

let balance find it way to me,
my strength rising
from the caverns of my ribs,
my body awake,

emerging, celebrating
the way I rise from my tiny darkness
its soaring telling stories
of light in shadows.

Fill My Empty Bones

I was not born a lion,
but there is fighting in the shadows

& strength follows.
Beneath that rock, my giant roots

provide depth & stability.
I was not born an eagle,

but there is strength
inside smaller wings

climbing out of the dark,
pressing upward & outward—

piercing the firmament to perch
on the hand of God.

•

Ariana D. Den Bleyker © 2023

Click title to open microchap

Cover: Secret Art by Lauri Burke

•

i.

Bones are hard to give up,
pushing out as daisies
growing under the hounding
heart of a copper sun.

Bones, unbroken, lack edges.
Jagged edges reflect brokenness;
the brokenness the whole.

Listen to their call:

the smell of sad,
odor colorless, musty invasive, well closeted,
saddling, saddling in place,
good wishes/good intentions/good prayers.

dig down deep,
six feet, perhaps more,
with heavy equipment,
uproot, follow sad all-the-way
down until the root is gone
& the saddest truth dead.

Ii.

Taste shocks/surprises/delights/lives
for those whose buds never blossomed for it.

iii.

Truth, we are told, is often served cold
& hard for the hearing, best avoided
in a mirror; though many lie
too easily, mirrors cannot.
The truth to be trusted is this:
no one is truly content—
there is always those who have more,
more burdens of a different sort,
better losses & pains.

Truth tastes terrible, hides well.

iv.

Our hands are right sized,
arms reaching around ourselves,
pleasure ours to give; ours to take,
neither better or worse.

Touch is language.

v.

Sight is overrated when imagination exists,
cannot be restrained, the unseen
telling us to look up, look up—
be life, save life.

Let your madness blossom in the spring air,
become a mathematical function
of the other four senses.

vi.

Read your face in the mirror,
its incapability of being too human,
quiet, stolen brightness
oh, it doesn’t belong to me
but this form is your black ceiling.
I’m just trying to be seen
& I see you—
I see you.

& you don’t know
how much is too much
& you don’t know
when you’ll be enough
& you’re stuck
cutting those senses
to bring them back—
back to largeness,
back to circular—
the insecure phases
of the moon,

& the sun does smirk
in the morning blue.

•

Ariana D Den Bleyker © 2021

Click title to download PDF microchap

Cover collage by Jan Keough

Author’s Note:
‘A Bridge of You,...’ originally published
in Rust + Moth

•

The Night My Future Husband
Stole My First Kiss

That I’d forgotten something—
(don’t think, just kiss me, just once)
That I was oddly humbled—
a mute scream tearing
from my chest,
ripped from my lungs,
battering against the wet, smooth
yet sticky feeling of lips jailing
my words—swift, brutal,
unexpected. Oh, how memorably
awkward it was yet how perfectly
smooth it came to be.

I Watch My Husband Work on My Jeep
& Am Reminded of His Selfless Protection

The slick, almost glowing ratchet turns
& clicks in his hands—a slow sea
of grime releases—grime, the spare part
in every repair—the secret formula
of vehicles (one-part leaked engine oil,
one-part road dust or tossed-up dirt
& pebbles kneaded for miles
upon thousands of miles behind
broken struts, universal joints.)

He’s peeled & scraped, welded,
torqued, tensioned & threaded,
a surrealistic painting of discipline
keeping vital wires from coming loose
or some small, but oh, so indispensable
part from its desire to squeak over
the horizon at eighty miles per hour.

The First Time I Wrapped My Hands
Around My Husband’s Waist for 100 Miles

I think of him ahead of me on an edge
of time too close to not forget
the feeling of my arms around his waist,
the motorcycle’s engine vibrating through
us both & it’s not so important
where we are or where we may go
because the hot, orange sky
spoke above the yellow daisies
& wind, his breathing. We’re one
& I glimpse his smile in the mirror;
I squeeze tighter to let him know I can see it.

•

A Bridge of You, to Myself, to the Parts
of the Bees’ Bodies Embedded in Our Flesh

The tension spanning your tongue
carries the words escaping your mouth,
pain igniting its tip, blistering your lips
with white heat, your longing, melting
skin off like dead bees pouring
from a smoking hive.
I listen intently
for the first time ever, exposing myself
to the silence simmering in the spaces
between your teeth—

the bare skin of our arms pelted with little
velvet bodies, our pores soaking in wild honey,
sharp edges of wings embedded inside.
No stings.

Whatever it means, why not say it hurts—
the pain slamming into us, the want?
I will call it beauty, kiss your raw lips
unlike I have ever kissed you before.

I Watch My Husband Play Hockey
& Am Reminded of His Ability
to Withstand My Winters

I.

Ice sprays under his skates, his body gliding
against the cold biting against the late
evening of early winter, breath escaping
in bursts of white fog rising & dissipating,
lungs & legs pumping hard, knees slightly
bent, getting fired up for the win knowing
even the best man sometimes takes a loss.

II.

The evening is brittle, everything moves
very slowly or not at all, but eventually
the sun will rise, — the ice will melt
birds will sing. Though the landscape may be
torn branches, snapped — forever altered
the trees remain stronger — & hanging
having seen ice like this before.

The Catfish My Husband Reels in
in August is More Than Just Fishing

I.

I imagine versions of cutthroat catfish,
of whiskers fighting the strong tepid water
to death, dreaming meaningless round
& oblong dreams swirling in pools
& backwaters of silken black,
careening emptiness
until the channel sweeps me down
into the lake or until I struggle
upward, always higher to the spillway
at the base of the dam.

II.

Such is the careful parsing by the mouth
— of fine white bones from equally white flesh
his heart both tongue & teeth discerning
landing constellations — spur
through a heaven stretching
into the future. Listen to the splash,
displaced weight into the water. Set
the pole down & whisper who we are.

•

Ariana D. Den Bleyker 2019

Unsent

To the Boy Who Stole My First Kiss

It’s an old story, you and I, hip to hip,
gathering wreckage in that kiss, me
not washing for days after wanting
the scent of both our bodies to sink in
somehow. I’ve so much to learn
about the sharp divide between before
and after, from biting into a fruit-bearing
heart, knowing the past sometimes
runs sweet and the future even sweeter.

To the Boy That Raped Me

Let me bruise again: think about
the ripe fruit in your palm eaten.
I could pretend I don’t remember.
I could pretend and not be sorry
for wanting to be dislocated,
to be taken apart and put back
together again. I’ll just keep think
-ing of you like this, like my throat
won’t swell from the stings.

To the Boy That Broke My Heart

To the Boy That Ran Away

Last night I woke to that same dream,
the one full of people that aren’t you.
The fear came back when I rose
from the soaked cloth of sleep
after digging down to the bone.
I’ll love, if I can, with knowing
our moments are gone. How I wish
you could be present, and pretend
for a moment, you miss me too.

To the Boy That Took My Breath Away

Because a prayer is never
enough to hold a woman.
Because the body must
here — house the heart
and held in this moment,
love, old tree feeding itself
in the deep. Say you’ll never
let go. Before my bones
quiet, before it’s much
too late to believe
your heart could ever stop

To the Boy I Pushed Away

Knowing portends what I’ll take
from this, whether I’ll walk or crawl,
the breadth of my breath, its given,
how, listening, I might step into
your mouth, proceed into your heart,
and, breathless, creep through
your bones, as if something could be
done to keep us together, as if
I could hold onto my wanting
someone, my wanting you.

Stitches

Cover from www.etsy.com

•

In Mommy’s Shoes

I used to love playing dress up
as a little girl. I saw my mother’s
closet as a magical dimension,
a place filled with beautiful clothes.
On me, her blouses became summer
dresses, dresses ball gowns, silk
scarves belts, and high heels
catapults into the future. I spent
countless hours staring at myself
in the mirror, secretly wishing
I was something beautiful heart
                                  could wear.

Mona Lisa’s Smile

Can I paint what’s on my mind,
creating my own masterpiece
straight from the heart? I’ve loads
of filled tubes, brushes, a canvas
large enough to achieve your smile.
I mix shades, sweep brushstrokes
with little confidence, rely on smudges,
charcoal sketches, the imperfection
of a little girl’s memory too vague
                            to know what’s real.

Baking

Emerging From Broken

Sometimes in the night I count
the embraces that never come.
        I call them perfect.
Even while they shatter
        like anything else’s
        bones.

Carried by the Wind

I was only wanting to rise full-bodied
like a heavy wet bird against the grey,
my mother gesturing, — suede sky
outstretched calloused hands, moist
starry eyes. No words. I want to recover
the legs of her lies, drape them over
my arms as a life preserver, float across
the wind for miles, ignoring
                                           the drowning.

Stitches

I watch mother’s hands—
watch the shifting of thin fabrics,
the needle captured
between two callused fingers,
as she pulls the fragile stitches
tighter. I study scars—wonder
what she sees when she looks
at my hands. She smiles, so I smile
back. I’m not supposed to talk,
to ask. I’m to see only the deftness
of a needle and the bright patterns
of cloth, the hidden stitches—
the way she laces us gently
together with her lies.

On Coming of Age

Click title to download microchap 

Cover: The web

•

On Coming of Age

I stood on the front porch, palms extended
to catch the drops. I ran down the steps,
splashed onto the street, caught more drops
in my mouth, my thin, floral sundress
clinging to my body, heavy braids weighing
down on my shoulders in the hot August
dampness—before I was old enough to shave
my legs, wear a bra, apply heavy black eyeliner,
before I knew how morning sex
could smell like a raging storm.

On Sex

Sometimes, when it rains in my dreams,
you come to me in your mother’s dress.
We dance together. You grin like a woman
who knows who she is. I taste the dampness
of your lips, and your beauty evaporates
into things darker than the spaces between
stars. This is how our love burns, bodies
aching, lips throbbing, rusty joints twisting,
squealing, bare flesh soaked in kerosene,
primal instincts rising from the mattress.

On Shaving

The last time we were alone together,
you nicked a vein, on purpose,
I think, on your face while shaving.
I might have touched it. You held
the wound apart. You didn’t want
A rare masterpiece. Wet. Slick. healing.
You must remember the last time I watched
you bleed helpless in the face of your loss,
how I thought a superhero Band-aid
would have been enough.

On Bridges I’ve Dreamed of Jumping From

Like crows they rise in a violence
against the sky, a dark constellation,
until they were flying, turning, turning
into the sun, losing themselves
in distance, weaving into a black
scarf until they unraveled westward,
taking with them what I’d once dreamed
for myself, all I believed and now
     cannot name.

On Reading Thoreau, Again

There is loss in everything. Winter gives
me new shape, both of us raw against
existence, both of us bare. We’re invisible
or invincible, closer to our ends than beginnings.
I find myself kneeling to better
examine small things, find solace within
myself, marvel at how steel breaks stone,
     bone.