Selections from ‘Meditations of a Beast’
Poetry by Kristine Ong Muslim
The System of Enchantment
It is only the rickety harbor
looking strange in the daylight that lifts the mist.
It is not the heresy that lends radiance to this world.
You and I won’t ever see through this haze
to watch the boatmen steer their rudderless
vessels bound for the Bering Strait,
watch the frail forms sniff the outside air,
watch them grow restless once they recognize the smell,
the stench that bodes the eventual death of things,
watch the feral forms find peace in the last
of the forests, watch the shaky forms roll
across the dwindling grassland, the denuded plain,
watch the winged forms rustle inside the cage
where they still believe they are free,
watch the people, watch the people
as they smile next to the cage.
There is no unseeing, no
unseeing this cruel, visible world.
But do you now see how the willingness to value
sentient life is the only true measure of humanity?
Overhead, the essential guillotine will
someday shift, sever the head from the body,
lay bare the eschatology in all creation myths,
expose the otherness that is vaguely familiar.
You and I won’t ever see through this haze,
but I see you. I see you — a vacant lot, a flattened box.
You sport the tormented gait of the immobile.
I see you — a staircase unwinding, a cold universe
expanding inside an endlessly receding room
where the system of enchantment thrives.
Somewhere, I exist. I am
the movement, the absolute stillness.
I am the self, mimed and fragmented. I am whole.
Somewhere, I exist because you exist,
and this fascination is
all we can carry, all we need.
Do you believe in white magic?
Notice how we don’t bruise easily,
how we can always heal and be healed.
Year of Shadows
Notice how we don’t bruise easily, how we can always heal and be healed. It’s all white magic, all faith in the realness of the far-fetched. We are the people outside, and we have heard rumors about the everyman, who will soon grow weary of the daily wearing of masks. The everyman, who will soon become bolder in his intrusions and will end up encroaching past the fields meant only for wild horses. We have heard about the everyman in the forestless city. The everyman lives with vertebrates, finding comfort in material things and the lure of ergonomic furniture. These vertebrates are well-supported blobs, coarse in their bloodthirsty clay that resists improvisation. Oftentimes, a dancer-everyman screams in pain as he distorts his body, quivering behind the plastic ferns, his spasm mistaken for graceful movement. The everyman also lives with versions of Geppetto’s ungrateful wooden boy, who is once again fibbing. We are the people outside. In the year of shadows, we laze in a hammock lined with fangs, exorcized by the great sleep. We are airless in the buffeting wind, sunburned by black light.
The People Outside
We are airless in the buffeting wind,
sunburned by black light.
To snuff out wakefulness, we swig unstable
bottlefuls of bleating electric sheep.
We spend days at a time wondering
what exactly is forgiveness, what is
decency in a world made of brokenness,
made of the titter and the coil, the gilded
arch and the filigree, the lilt and the lull.
The quiet din exhorts us to stay for a while
inside rooms laden with manmade objects,
with kitchen curtains whose invisible
folds will soon be destroyed by fire,
with farmhands slightly unhinged
by the onset of a long dry season.
All this time, eutrophied rivers choke
in green algal blooms. Neurotic doors
swing shut to reveal the trophy rooms
of gun-toting buffoons. Men in hazmat suits
try to put out the intractable black fire.
The Oil Spill
Men in hazmat suits try to put out
the intractable black fire. They lug snakes
that spurt fire-retardant polymer beads.
The ocean heaves, a centimeter or two
deeper than last year. There is now a sickly
sweet undertone to the smell of brine.
The spill is all over the beach, scalding
the lithe behemoths of the deep
and the fragile ones in shells.
The spill blinds, burns seabirds,
grows pustules and canker sores
on the skins of everything that lives.
The spill is cackling lunacy gushing,
enfolding the continental crust.
The spill is slick on the surface of the dead.
The Village of Fog
The spill is slick on the surface of the dead.
Then it seeps into porous clay, taints the aquifer.
Here is the local cemetery, where some of us
stop bristling at the possibility of decay.
In the west, the orchard. Wait for it to bloom.
In January, the frigid vastness can be spanned
with arms outstretched. Elsewhere is the sea,
where some of us break the surface, backs and flanks
against the squall. Beyond is the beleaguered
calm. A village is nothing but suffocating fog,
nothing but cogs, subsoil, oblivion.
A dirt road lurks inside every house.
Excerpted from the poetry collection Meditations of a Beast from Cornerstone Press. Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Ong Muslim.
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, including, most recently, Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016) and Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016). She serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore, and was co-editor with Nalo Hopkinson of the Lightspeed Magazine special issue, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. Widely published in magazines and anthologies, she grew up and continues to live in rural southern Philippines.
