Poetry By Ariana D. Den Bleyker

       Seth Stoll CC



Slipping
 
 
The scar of this poem is buried beneath it.
It gives strength, swaggers through the body,
 
its fingers pressed against the flesh,
its name—skin,
 
a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed 
a thousand fissures spreading mood
 
& flattening dreams. Don’t speak,
the skin will melt. Find parallel words
 
floating along side the highway
& pluck them like roses.
 
Healing doesn’t speak. It’s easier that way.
It slips its curved fingers down
 
the throat & pulls out the strength in echoes.

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Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, LLC, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches (Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, 2019), America in Solitude (Staring Problem Press, 2019), and The Human Body Falls at a Rate of 32 Seconds per Second (Alien Buddha Press). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She is the founder and publisher of ELJ Editions. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.
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