Back to Issue Sixteen.

world’s tiniest human

BY MURIEL LEUNG

 

of rosettes and rotting majesty, her throat as slim

as stem and poised to snapping. How she rattles

with each spook. She sneezes and a white feather

coffin sets to drift. Tinker bones on the shattering end.

But glass is glass. Someone made her. Inflated her shy

pouch with cheap pinks. One day loving up a worker bee

and the next, pricked. Death follows her to the milkweed

edge where hand shreds root. Singing all the while

Love me, love me until the sky tips over. Death loves.

When she spills, the forest is coated white and all across

the grass, each one daggers. Someone loses a mirror

and a tooth. Someone dances a spindle song that skips

on record twice. To a Molly fish, a hollow says:

I want to belong to someone, to anyone, but only half a night.

 

Muriel Leung is from Queens, NY. 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 a poetry reader for Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. Her first book Bone Confetti is forthcoming from Noemi Press in October 2016.

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