gallery

 

Welcome to The Gallery at darkcoastpress.com!

Think of The Gallery as an art gallery of great writing from a variety of writers in prose, poetry, essay, and experimental work.  We diplay the best of submitted work openly, more like a gallery than a journal, magazine, or review.  Come in off the street, read a bit, take its impressions away with you.  The menu to the left is arranged by latest published edition, and all authors and featured pieces organized accordingly.   Check back monthly for each new edition.  Thank you, and enjoy reading!

If you are interested in submitting work to appear on The Gallery we would love to have you.  Send submissions by email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and please, please, please read our Submissions Guidelines, all the good stuff’s in there.



Kristine_Ong_Muslim

 

Kristine Ong Muslim’s work has appeared in over four hundred publications worldwide, most recently in Coe Review, Cold-Drill, Grasslimb, Paper Crow, Polluto, and Southword.  She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and four times for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award. Her publication credits are listed here.  “The Boating Party” appeared in the journals Monkey Kettle and Sub Lit. “Bigheads” appeared in Six Little Things in 2009.

 




Kristine Ong Muslim

The Gallery May 2010; Ed. 2

© 2010 Kristine Ong Muslim


•  The Festival

•  The Boating Party

•  Bigheads


The Festival

Kristine Ong Muslim

 


(after Max Ernst's Snow Flowers)

They were our dried out heads, you see,
tumbling down the dumpster. Someone
took time to rearrange the smiles
on our faces, to punch out the noses,
to scrunch us with borrowed mustaches,
dimples, and facial hair. We were a
merry civilization now, a garden where
nobody could tell one from another.



 



The Boating Party

Kristine Ong Muslim



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.

 


 


Bigheads

Kristine Ong Muslim

They rarely talk in their sleep. The nurses even say that, sometimes, they do not even wake up at all.

"Radiation has made those infants grow to the size of a fully grown German shepherd," Dr. Flip explains to the crowd. "Please do not feed them with your bare hands. Please do not look at them directly in the eyes." Then he motions for one of the attendants to close the door behind.

The tour continues. Someone, possibly the bald man who is about to sneeze, has been led away. Expectant parents hold hands, smiling at each other like old turtleneck sweaters which sag at the right places. Dr. Flip distributes several souvenirs -- a mug containing the hospital's logo, casts of one of the giant baby's umbilical cord, and pamphlets with information about irradiation. Maximize the growth potential of your offspring, it says on the cover.