In college, I learned nothing
except humility, which I never
considered to be necessary.

I flunked an engineering mechanics
course twice and understood the
therapeutic properties of sifted

garden dirt and the premise that
all forces could act in all dimensions
if a professor willed them to.

The silence at the end of the corridor
was a vector quantity; it knew what
it wanted. I remembered having

a girlfriend then. She was a bubble in need
of piercing by a pin. She married my dorm
roommate. While studying at night, I used to

feel for the pulse of my chipped coffee mug.
It was faint, and my mug was dying. My best friend
was the physics major who jumped from the roof

of the administration building; he knew about
game theory, the poetry behind Fourier transforms,
and man’s inability to see all the frequencies of light.

About the Author

Kristine Ong Muslim

Kristine Ong Muslim’s work has appeared in over four hundred publications worldwide including Boston Review, Coe Review, Cold-Drill, Grasslimb, The Pedestal Magazine, and Southword. She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and four times for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award.