Two Cambodian American Poems

Abstract

Two Cambodian American Poems Bunkong Tuon (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Liza Martin, Homelessness Home (2023), oil on canvas, 11 x 13 cm How to Defeat Pol Pot Call your children by their true names.Love. Divine. Angels. My heart. Be gentle with them.Speak the truth: They were born out of love.These divine creatures. Tell them the Angkor Empire stoodfor six hundred years. America is half that age.Read to them Khmer poetry. Show them Apsaras dancing on temple walls.Pick up a paintbrush, play an instrument. Let the soul sing its song.The Khmer Rouge made angels of us all. We soared over killing fieldsto find home on foreign shores. Keep memories of the victims in songs and prayers,in the spoonful of rice we feed our children. Sing to the moon for what it witnessed. [End Page 38] I've Been Border-Crossing All My Life after Anisa Rahim's "A Russian Hacked My Pinterest Account" I'm not talking about the sudden packing up of things a pair of pants, a bag of uncooked rice, gold sewn inside belts salted fish, soil from mother's grave, a small statue of BuddhaNot having time to say goodbyes to friends, not knowing if this leaving would be forever it was foreverSitting on Lok-Yeay's back as my family trekked through jungles, stepping in small rivers where if you looked to your right or left dead bodies & torn-off limbs everywhere tiny fish feeding on rotten meat I looked up from the darkness the night sky was turning the stars were bright clear and real I could almost pluck them the universe was alive And the silence was eternal the warm presence of ancestors how deeply comforting the cosmic ocean I'm not talking about life in refugee camps not quite in Thailand, not quite in Cambodia it was the third space of nothingnessFloating from one camp to another home was homelessness home was the longing for what we left behind home was speaking to ghosts I'm talking about finding a bird with broken wingsLooking for lizards, frogs, snakes, crickets anything that was alive imagining they were my fatherI'm talking about speaking to the bird as if it were my mother as I tended to wings broken red-stained I'm not talking about getting on a dinghy some Thai fishermen used to take us across the Gulf of Thailand to Indonesia, our little boat almost swallowed by giant waves I'm talking about seeing a mermaid in the midst of a storm while everyone cried-prayed to Buddha for help I saw a mermaid floating calmly in the terrible waves Bunkong Tuon Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer and poet. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Lowell Review, American Journal of Poetry, Diode Poetry Journal, among others. His debut novel, Koan Khmer, is forthcoming from Curbstone Press. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. Tuon teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, New York. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma