Ayn Frances dela Cruz

Ayn Frances dela Cruz is an ESL teacher in Uzbekistan. She recently graduated with a Masters in International Art and Culture Management from Rome Business School where her startup Paper Monster Press was longlisted for the #RBS4 Entrepreneurship Prize. A fellow of the 7th UST National Writers Workshop and the Montaggio Writers Workshop, her work has been published in local Philippine and international magazines and anthologies and her micro-chapbook, Tumbleweed, was published by Tiny Press.

Cover by Frederick Agustin.

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► Ayn Frances dela Cruz's microchap & (selected) poems are available below. Download the PDF by clicking the title.

Origami Microchap with Selected Poems

The faces translated

Click title to download micro

Cover by Frederick Agustin

Artist Note: The artwork can be the "face", with layers and textures of emotion...
perhaps peeling or changing... the artwork can also represent the crumpled paper of "origami"... It can also be a passing rain over water "salt sea" ... where we can feel the
"Serrated surfaces of the sea".

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The faces translated

I saw her peeling off her face
and looking so intently at a skin
that no longer
fits

it could just as well
be me
Or we

and thus were our faces translated
From skin to typeset
from idea to marrow
from blood to binding

one a question, one a period
all an exclamation.

Choices

How many doors does it take for one to
find that door? The man had to choose between
the lady or the tiger. In one door
there is seeming death, in the other
possible death. Predictably, beauty
is only possible pain. Talk about
probabilities in a world of ifs.
The tiger prances on the long bars of
its cage. The lady sits without a cage.
Who’s to say it’s not the man who is
caged? How many doors until that door that
leads only to the roads between death? How
to choose? That is wisdom. To pay the price?
That is pain. To be human is to know.

Ouroboros

The Japanese say
the face that you fell in love with
In your last life
Is now your face.

when you look in the mirror
The face of your beloved from another life
Peers back at you
is this why we admire ourselves in mirrors?
Ourselves, or the other who loved us?
Expectant and exultant
The love of a mirror
For a mirror

The faces loved, converge on one face
Ouroboros. The snake eats itself
And completes the circle to infinity

The mirror holds it up
A reflection of a reflection
our eyes are mirrors
In the quest for truth
Of love
And other ordinary things

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Poets