Three Pieces by Kristine Ong Muslim

Arnie Duran, farmhand

Even in my dreams, I smelled cow manure.
I would run away from the stench, and quietly,
the blades of grass stabbed at my feet.

The thread that passed through the hands
of small-town farmers created a wound--
a dormant stigmata. The grain was god, was life
inside a dried husk less than an inch long.

I never questioned the beauty of the fields--
green to amber--and how the wind rustled them.
By harvest season, I could hold the immensity
in my hands--but how this vastness could encroach.

Little Jimmy, my cousin who fled towards the city,
had a friend who once told him that blasphemy
had its own brand of redemption. It was the only way
to arch back in the direction of the universe.
That is why I sometimes took the name of the Devil in vain.

Federico crossing the border

I cannot see the hand that grips
the other side of the leash, but there's

the tuft of grass lining the border.
I must trespass, put my feet flat

on the other side. So strange--that string
of breath in its invisibility and how it

holds my people together but
farther and farther away from me.

Federico crossing the border

I cannot see the hand that grips
the other side of the leash, but there's

the tuft of grass lining the border.
I must trespass, put my feet flat

on the other side. So strange--that string
of breath in its invisibility and how it

holds my people together but
farther and farther away from me.

--Kristine Ong Muslim publication credits and recent acceptances include more than seven hundred poems and stories in over three hundred publications worldwide, such as Adbusters, Bellevue Literary Review, Chronogram, Cordite, Narrative Magazine, New Madrid, The Pedestal Magazine, Riddle Fence, Scrivener Creative Review, and Turnrow. Kristine has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and received several Honorable Mentions in Year's Best in Fantasy and Horror.