A Sixth Lesson in Magic
by Kristine Ong Muslim
Drag the barrel
where our names
and allotted lifetimes
are carved on the surfaces
of little white balls
the size of pain.
Tilt it and expose the mouth
of the god who spins
the variations of the seasons
to amuse us,
while its gnarled left hand
draws the names,
the measured syllables of last breath,
and the numbers
out of the drum.
Moths
by Kristine Ong Muslim
Pitiful and angry and very afraid,
the tiny brown moths huddled before me
while I wrote love letters deciphered
as insincere prayers under the white
light of a plastic desk lamp.
"Life is a nightmare train," I told them
every night. "It will take you everywhere
at a speed of its own choosing,
will never wait for you to find out
how far it can lead you away from home."
And always, the voiceless moths stayed
with me, still waiting for the time when
I would grow tired of having them around
and finally set them free. I gave them hope
all the time, told them lies.
The moths lost their true faces many years ago:
the half-remembered faces of the missing ones,
the friends and lovers who had betrayed me,
all the beautiful ones I chose to give wings
so they could flit around me.
Strange Baby
by Kristine Ong Muslim
The baby liked them
with their heads off;
the housekeepers
had to decapitate
the birthday clown first
to make the child smile
for the family picture.
The Darkest Magic
by Kristine Ong Muslim
You spill your secrets--clattering like
cheap beads on white marble halls.
A river here, a mountain there:
there is nothing that you cannot create when
there is too much magic and too much time.
For entertainment, you have saved them all
from the flood that you have seeded and grown
in your basement of wishing wells and rune tablets.
Your heart swells to let your dark-eyed children
inside your cathedral of glass and light,
where your words echo from the mouths
of your appointed prophets. You give
the desperate cinder girls jeweled talking
mirrors, and you watch them grow
into your fair-skinned likeness.
In between seasons, you try to make the golden
flowers stay, but autumn always wins in the end.
Unable to die, you look down to where
your reflection on the water begins,
but the ripples deface the image away.
The darkest magic will deliver you from harm,
and still you wish to rot, wish to drip
the juices of your decay down
to the permeable earth where the dust
and the bones of your people are burie
Third God
by Kristine Ong Muslim
Tides and swells
are only for little
gods who are content
of pushing and pulling
with no harm done.
I breathe hard, exhale deep,
and blow twisters to kill
those little gods at my feet.
Kristine Ong Muslim's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Coyote Wild Magazine, From the Asylum, Jupiter, Kaleidotrope, The Literary Bone, Spinning Whorl, Tales of the Talisman, and previous issues of Speculative Fiction Centre. Her publication history: http://www.freewebs.com/blackroom8
She co-authored an illustrated chapbook collection of genre poems for children, Oddities (Sam's Dot Publishing, 2006), which is available at The Genre Mall.