Kristine Ong Muslim lives in the Philippines and is a prolific writer. Her publication credits and recent acceptances include more than five hundred poems and stories in over two hundred journals and magazines worldwide, such as Bellevue Literary Review, Caveat Lector, Chronogram, Cordite, Etchings, Grasslimb, Pearl, The Pedestal Magazine, Scrivener Creative Review, and Turnrow.

Dream elements from parcel #22

This is the point when the night loses its dye;
there are nine chandeliers overhead.

The fire-eaters have been sent home,
but the smell of kerosene remains.

The space between two adjacent secrets--
yours and your husband's--is the width
of the three-letter word lie.

In the absence of miracles, a vase conceals
the uprooted ends of the soaking cut flowers.

 

The Darker Daughter

She is an
eye that never blinks,
a bone shaving
that yellows
with time.

Way back in third grade,
we shared the same desk,
laughed at the same jokes.

She once drew a stick figure of me;
she said that I looked far, far better
than the caricature on paper. I believed
her, wondered about what a totem pole
wanted from a leveled ground.

Eleven years later, there were rumors that she
had hitchhiked, disappeared. It was the end
of summer, and nobody asked why.
I noticed a mound
of freshly overturned earth
on her mother's backyard.

I heard that her mother
dusted her room on Sundays
while her older brother tended
the flower garden.

 

Death of a Coffee Mug

It is chipped. I feel for its pulse--
feeble through the porcelain layer
where its will resides. I breathe
warmth into it, scald it with black
coffee. Burnished, its outer surface
has been re-armed, like a handful
of flung wreckage which can
temporarily blind the eyes.
I can hear it grow cold in my hand.

 

Death of a Soda Can

Whenever it opens up, it is mostly summer.
It fizzles. A death-choke. The liquid inside
rambles on a theory about thirst.
Now drained, the tin can is hollowed--
the belly of an anorexic. It crinkles,
and its vestigial wing begins
to blister under my thumb.

 

Death of a Tissue Box

I simplify the dimensions of a death box.
Its whiteness unfurls with each gasp.
I widen the slit on its belly. I clutch
at its entrails, pull them out one by one.
There's the sun wrung into a string.
There's the imaginary blackness coiled at the bottom.
There's the softness shackled, bled into strips.
I crumple the entrails, twist them.
They always yield to every tug. I stop only
when something tears. Pain, for me, is in the
details. I flatten the dead box afterwards.