Kristine Ong Muslim

From the point of view of a book

We are idiots grappling at the mercy
of language, of art. Most of the time,

the pages are blank. The words are just
random ink stains made by a bored spinster,

yet we look hard, read something that is not
there. Even in our sleep, we murmur

alliterations, graze imagined metaphors
on our floral sheets, pretend that we are awake.

Murder Lesson

He had drifted apart--a small unshaken tribe
of the disgusted, the unschooled.

Here was a slice of a dark miracle, a taut orange
strand of horizon plucked from his forgotten

childhood in a small town by the lake. He used
to want what we all wanted, until he placed

a handful of himself inside his clenched fist,
into his pocket, then waited for it to sing.

Odd Angles

You see them all the time.
The dimension of a window that

does not exist. A slice of memory
glazed with imagined crimes

because you have mastered how to tend lies.
(They do not need to be watered daily.)

Then there's the story of a man who rushes
home. One hour late for his wife's funeral.

Then

When you think that you are the captain
of your oversized coffin-shaped ship,

you will suddenly realize that you
are still tied to the moorings,

that the sea under your feet
is heavier than the combined weight

of your body, your baggage of soul
and motivations, your identity papers.

More than six hundred stories and poems by Kristine Ong Muslim have been published or are forthcoming in over three hundred publications world. Her work has appeared in Adbusters, Bellevue Literary Review, Caveat Lector, Ducts, Farrago's Wainscot, GlassFire Magazine, New Madrid, Otoliths, and The Pedestal Magazine.