Two Poems
By Kristine Ong Muslim

Marginalia

An attempt at language--that lilt
of a love song. She swears that it

has nothing to do with desire, with
this almanac of breathing methods

and color-coded spreadsheets,
epistemology and diction.

The skeleton of lanterns rustles
underfoot. Bared to its syntax at last.

Some Design Flaws in the Housebuilder's Blueprint

The house squats on its cellar-belly,
and we get earthquakes whenever
the house is hungry. Most of the time,
we don't have a choice but to lure visitors
from out of town and push them down
the maw under the living room rug.
The house is nocturnal, belches and hums,
sighs and scratches its nose in the middle
of the night, causing us to fall off our beds.
It snores during the day, and how the chandeliers
tinkle, how the toilet bowls flush their water down.

——

Kristine Ong Muslim has published more than seven hundred stories and poems in over three hundred publications worldwide. Her work has appeared in Adbusters, Bellevue Literary Review, Caveat Lector, Ducts, Farrago's Wainscot, GlassFire Magazine, New Madrid, Otoliths, and The Pedestal Magazine.

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