THE BOATING PARTY

The henchman who borrows screams

slips wine bottles inside the ice buckets.

The baldness of a birthday-party balloon

drifts past. Half a shell of a shriveled oyster

is a splotch of still life on a white plate.

The Captain wants his gun back. Drunk with

sea sickness, four tourists leap overboard.

A little boy chuckles, waves goodbye.

THE REVENGE OF HUMPTY DUMPTY

Brittle egghead, white as the day his Mama

bleached him for conformity, sees the

throng of kingsmen and villagers below.

Eight feet of stone wall--not bad for a kid

who understands that life is a terrible secret,

loses its allure if one stops to smell the details.

He recognizes the smug look of the homeless,

the sneering of the burghers; he notices them

lick their lips while their hunger-eyes implore him

to jump, to live up to his name--now, here, forever.

The kingsmen are shooing him away, shouting at him

to not take the leap, to not make history, but their

mocking eyes cannot be tucked away from sight.

So he turns away, goes down the ladder carefully.

And the crowd says boo.

More than six hundred poems and stories by Kristine

Ong Muslim have been published or are forthcoming in

over two hundred journals and magazines worldwide. Her

work has appeared in Blue Fifth Review, Chimera

Magazine, Dog Versus Sandwich, GlassFire Magazine,

Grasslimb, GUD Magazine, Hot Metal Press, and Slow

Trains. “The Boating Party” first appeared in Monkey Kettle #27. “The Revenge of Humpty Dumpty” first appeared in Wanderings Vol. 3 Issue 1.

POETRY