Muriel Leung

A House Fell Down on All of Us

The beast of the beast of the mouth
of the beast was a turn-flower.

How was I to know what was rupture
from the good yarn the basilisk still
with her poison in the tumbling after-days.

I was a house.
I was a witch.
I brewed immense amounts of coffee
for immense men who thwarted the siren-veil
and collapsed into chimney heaps of hay.
I loved all of them, I said
as they were taking me away into burying ground
beyond the potato root all objects made
permeable by the sneeze.

I was undressing while I did my time;
laundered the aftermath with its cotton yellow and peppery snot while I did my time.
I am waiting for some ordinance to (what is the law even) come save me—
an oven, my dancing shoes, love the disputed tar.
I came to milk and I was dissolving I dissolved. 

 

Muriel Leung

Muriel Leung is the author of Bone Confetti (Noemi Press 2016). Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, Ghost Proposal, Jellyfish Magazine, inter|rupture, and others. She is a recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and is a regular contributor to The Blood-Jet Writing Hour poetry podcast. She is also the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY. For more about her work, please visit: www.murielleung.com.

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