I arrived in the U.S. in 1980 after a series of refugee camps in Thailand.

 

I can’t say it’s the language per se, which helps me to be more direct, more vocal about my feelings. I’d say it’s through trust and love of a very patient husband that I can now stand up and be loud about my feelings, whereas before I would fold and mull over. Still do it time to time.

As for “speaking the same language” and “the routine of torture”– When I was imprisoned for stealing food, two Khmer Rouge cadres brought me out into the open. It was nighttime. They told me they would let me go if I could run past a certain tree before they could count to ten. I believed them. I took off and reached a tree before ten, but instead I plowed into and bounced off some tree because I could not see. Because I was blindfolded. But I had to at least try. Because I was nine years old, I took things literally, word for word. I found out quickly that those words, theirs, were meaningless, foreign, in a situation where the intent was to harm.

 

 

I don’t get to read much with a two-and-a-half-year-old who keeps saying, Quick, I need a hug, Momma. I’m just a baby. When I do read, I mainly stick to English. I tried a while back to write in Khmer, but it was just too hard. I had to look up too many words. My formal education in Cambodia is of first and part of second grade. During the Khmer Rouge, all schools were closed. I cannot read Khmer poems: the language is very different from the everyday Khmer. Khmer poetry is very rigid in meters and rhymes and rhythms. It is presented as a song.

 

My intention for these poems was to say, among these bone piles, there’re families: there’s a mother, a father, and a child, who were never given a chance to see light. Families are still ruined. “I am here” was written after the first verdict of the tribunal court. I don’t want to discredit the effort to finding justice, but the reality is one cannot hope for a full-service satisfaction in a tainted system. I think that voice comes from being a mother.

 

I chose poetry because I didn’t have to use too many words. Not so smart a move.

 

I want people to understand that she, the speaker, is here not to draw blood, just to tell the story because the survivors are still too hurt to speak out. She has forgiven, but she does not forget.

 

My hope is to be read.

 

 

 

 

1

 

There is a reason I am here

in the world. I can no longer wait

to be acknowledged by someone believing

that this is only for matters concerning the earth

 

and what’s already done. I am somebody –

once speaking face to face,

man to man, but you dismissed me,

kicking me in my chest and head, again and again, when I appealed to you

speaking the same language

 

in the routine of torture. You said, shut up,

if you cry, you’ll get more. What was I to do

 

but stand up for myself. Your threats no longer affect me.

Do you hear me? I am beyond reproach.

What more can you do?

Piss on my bones again?

 

2

 

I am here to speak

because they are too afraid

to remember, still too stunned to speak out

what are making them cry out at night. (Children, mothers

to deny a life of nightmares.)

 

I am not like them. Did you think that I would shut down that easily?

That I would crumble again and yield

(to bury the hatchet) because now you said

impunity for the Khmer Rouge defectors. That their slates are wiped clean,

each killing dismissed, each life meaningless.

 

3

 

What do you make me of? An animal

again before my frightened children: a ewe

to be gutted-up for your experimental

 

eating pleasure. You, you, and you over there

in council chair, do you think I don’t know

how many gall bladders it took to dye

your eyes a permanent yellow?

 

You, you, you, you, you. Whoever is left,

you know who you are. Shame on you,

even now, still having the gall to deny

us our part in our own history book?

We’re a saga, an era of mass slain.

 

What are you afraid of –

that your own children will see you as monsters?

 

 

 

Day in day out. Twice a day sometimes three:

after each drill-run, you come back beaten-

flat on your back and tossed in the holding compartment

with the others covered in human filth.

 

You’ve gone above and beyond what is objectively possible

for a small round thing. You’ve taken so many drop-

kicks, knee-jabs, and head-butts from all

players: captains,

warden, interrogators,

edgy guards, unsteady –

too young to nap standing up,

too restless for prison silence.

 

In the playing field, each contact

delivered upon your person intended

to bury one more for the home-field.

No restraint.

No fumbled thought.

 

all forces are sent in with every intent to lift you off.

You’re all net.

 

In the end, you’re supple,

a mush inside

this confinement of skin,

riddled by punctured marks, possibly leaking

and bleeding internally.

 

 

 

 

(high school turned Khmer Rouge prison turned museum)

 

You may have seen me and not remembered.

I’m that way with people: it’s always been that way

for people like me, who were slaughtered in groups.

 

Individual faces fade.

Like city crowds, faces blurred, each hardly remembered,

lost, especially in big numbers

 

staggered in the millions. The Holocaust, and now us;

one out of every four had to die. I was picked.

My husband was picked as well

 

and our four year old. Would have been thirty-three

this year, the one I carried inside. Three more months

to be born during rice harvest’s considered lucky.

 

I know you can’t tell from just my mug-shot.

Not even in my full profile. I didn’t show much

in my then loose clothes. Nobody knew; the guards didn’t know

 

that he’s already six months along. He (we wanted a boy) was small

but kicked a lot. Probably because he

wasn’t getting much to eat because

 

we weren’t given much for our rations. I grew thin,

even with my husband’s shares. Early on, we had hoped

and prayed that we’d lose him in the first trimester, so he wouldn’t suffer much.

 

We’d always known he was special because he was conceived

on our fifth anniversary. There wasn’t much except each other

that night. No cake— no flowers

 

no incense— no monks

no honeymoon suite— no reservation made nor to make

no special dishes, except our portions of the thin rice porridge.

 

What little food they gave us, we made it special

by switching our bowls. My Sweetie had insisted

so I could get more

 

to our baby. Our semi-miracle,

still hanging on. Our angel daughter

finally asleep and forgotten about hunger.

 

Poor girl, most of her life

always remembering the food she hadn’t had yet. Crying

constantly. Nothing staved her off long enough.

 

At the end, a picture does not say a thousand words.

At least, not in my case.

You wouldn’t have known about our unborn son.

 

 

 

 

 

If you made yourself disappear

deep in the green rice field, it’s not hard to imagine

you can hear the grain churning

milky sap into each solid seed,

the grassy blades whispering, giving in to the winds

and weights of the dragonflies, bending

 

farther from the sun.  Hidden from eyesight,

on the dirt division between the rice fields, sunning frogs

belly-plop into the water, erupting

like raindrops tearing up the face of the pond.

The snails uncap their suction-

cupped mouths, letting go

as ankle-deep water rushes up,

 

ripple after ripple.  You tell yourself to hold still.

Crouch low, stay hidden

because you’ve been eating stolen rice.

 

Bodies fall

in a sudden tackle, wrapped up like wriggling eels

tearing through mud.  Slip, slap, up the muddy water; limbs writhing,

pinned down.  Three against one

holding one helpless

child too shaken to come out.  Too stunned,

too mesmerized by the struggle.

 

Afterward, your ears drum

the beating like a herd of hooves

stampeding out a snake.  Crack,

crack, crunch, crunch like brittle twigs,

like hooves on bones,

like hooves shattering a brain, then you know

you’ll never see a rice field without feeling fragile

bone cracked lifeless

somewhere amid the emerald vastness.

 

 

 

What’s done is done.  You are nothing to me

but many forms molded by shifting

breaths in my dreams.

 

Go ahead; say it, say you enjoy coming back

to torment me.  I know you.  When have you not

taken great joy in getting what you want out of me?

 

You never knock before entering my bedroom.

Standing by my bed, checking yourself in my mirror,

wearing nothing

 

but your usual smirk, you watch me squirming, backing

my head deeper into my pillow.  You know you have me locked in.

You can have me any which way: quietly and calmly

 

or riled up with insistent sobs, when you take the shapes of my parents.

You know I am helpless for them.

Before the Khmer Rouge, they were my everything.

 

All my needs to live as a child.  Just happy, always

fed and held and warmed.  Starved but never starvation,

disciplined but never taught to hate, or hit

 

and smash to death.  You saw me see this killing and

you saw me shaking like a leaf,

playing someone else older than nine, mumbling

 

awake to my own shouting,