| Breathless
What does it do, that thing on the sidewalk? Somebody has stomped on it, but it will not call for help. The receding flood water is taking pieces of it down the gutter. A child rudely prods it with a stick. It will not twitch. It will not budge. Does it know that it has to feel pain to be alive? It gets run over by a car whose driver is looking for a parking spot. Mid-afternoon and there goes the wheel of a grocery cart ferrying a spitting kid. And that thing on the sidewalk, that thing with a death smile, that thing simply will not die again. Double Exposure This is how I get the story right: I forget it the moment it is captured in the mind, do not let it hold its shape. In my library, a famous dirty old man tells about a bluebird that hunkers inside all of us. It is beautiful. It must not fly out. My favorite coffee cup turns coffee murk into imagined sunsets; the color leaks as it touches my mouth. I would have liked for that moment to last. So I make more of the same blend. But all the other sunsets look different afterwards. |
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| Kristine Ong Muslim |
| More than six hundred poems and stories by Kristine Ong Muslim have been published or are forthcoming in over three hundred publications worldwide. Her poetry can be found in numerous online journals like 42opus, Apocryphal Text, Bare Root Review, Barnwood Magazine, Blackmail Press, Blue Fifth Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Cordite, Dog Versus Sandwich, Dogmatika, Ducts, JuiceBox, Mannequin Envy, Mastodon Dentist, Nthposition, Offcourse, Radiant Turnstile, Silenced Press, Slow Trains, Tattoo Highway, The Driftwood Review, The Fifteen Project, The Oklahoma Review, Thieves Jargon, and Zygote In My Coffee. http://www.freewebs.com/blackroom8 |
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