folded / unfolding

a poem on remembering my shape

my son has a pop up book

of scary paper dinosaurs that seem to jump off the page when you open it

and when you close it, they fold in very specific ways

so the book can lay flat

can a person be folded?

because I think I was

folding myself, that is

dragging my nail to make deep creases

so that I could fold over myself

and keep folding when I needed to shrink even more

or take another shape, a safer one

like origami

except at one point I was no longer the paper crane

because I had to fold even smaller

until I was just a tiny square

folding, folding, folding

in on myself

I’m reading a surrealist novel

and right after my revelation about my own

folding, folding, folding

I read a chapter

about a man whose job is to fold paper

and he travels through time and space by folding paper

and he sends people through his paper door by folding them in it

and they lose their breath

before landing in a new place

this cant be coincidence? that I had this thought about myself

folding, folding, folding

and then I read this chapter in this book?

it cannot be a coincidence that I myself traveled through space and time

by folding myself

into something unrecognizable

losing my breath with each crease

trapping my bigness inside of foreign shapes

I’m starting to unfold

opening pieces of me and tending to the deep bends

that will flatten over time

but the grooves will linger

reminding me of all the ways I know how to fold

dispelling the sovereignty from my voice with every crease

an inanimate object squeezed dry of her blood and breath

the most flattened version of me collecting dust on the shelf

I’m unfolding

re-learning my own shape

remembering what it’s like

to have enough space

to breathe

unfolding
ayu, 2025