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Poetry by
Kristine Ong Muslim

The Tree That Bore Heads by Nadia J. Mahfix
The Tree That Bore Heads by Nadia J. Mahfix



From the Diary of a Social Climber


Conceit is a function of distance; that is the reason I have been running as fast as I can. I do not notice what’s inside my pocket all this time. It does not tinkle at all—the skeleton key to a childhood nightmare, the one about the old woman with white hair, the one about the old woman under my bed.

I prick the fear-bubble with the tip of my nails; ten years later, I still hear the popping sound in my head.

I, I am the most prized painting in my enemy’s gallery, the icing-flecked birthday candle in someone else’s birthday cake, a commodity in a spring clearance sale. I rearrange my arms to attract the tourists. I chatter under the chandeliers in an aviary filled with dead girls just like me.







From the Diary of a Treasure Hunter


At twenty-two, I invited myself to my own party.

Every morning, sunlight off the tent flaps glinted like suicide. Some stuttering god needed aspirin for breakfast. The medicine box was empty. I liked it that way.

On the fifth month. One of the guys, a squat and bristling Indiana Jones, lost his two fingers on his left hand. Blood seeped into the cracks, the layers of dirt, the stuff of time. He got drunk that night, made shadow figures with his remaining three fingers.

A backdrop to oblivion was a sky containing a single disembodied hand.

X was supposed to mark the spot. We had been excavating the area for months. Four times a day, I imagined something yellowish and metallic out of the deepest hole.