Two Poems
2021; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/man.2021.0046
ISSN1527-943X
Autores Tópico(s)Cambodian History and Society
ResumoTwo Poems Princess Moon (bio) blessing dance bless the full moon,our eldest ancestor.your fingers gently combing through the Mekong River.bless the apples harvested by my mother during the war.bless her first bite during starvation.bless this game of death.how quickly I've learned that the bruised are discarded. bless the fireworks,the red wine,the American dream.bless my mother's triggers,the loud celebrations that make her cringe.bless the sun that turns her skin red.how she stays inside to hide from it now.bless the factory jobs,especially the illegal ones,the only ones in our new English-speaking cities. bless my father.bless his ghost.bless our parents and their silence.bless the invention of internalization.the fears we were born with.bless my mother for not knowing how to cope withmy traumas, my sister's traumas,my brother's traumas. bless us for not knowing how to help our mother heal.bless the generational gap.this undeserving culture shock.bless my first language and my parents' second. [End Page 111] bless my second language and my parents' first.bless the Khmer phrases my mother has taught me.how they sound simple like troam but meanto survive this heartbreakingly painful struggle in your life.bless not knowing how to describe your tormenting pain.bless our girls.please. bless our mothers.bless the men who know how to make our mothers cry.bless the first time I heard her cry in the shower.bless the first time she cried in front of me.how she was sharing her stories of the ghosts of the genocide.how we both would be ghosts if she didn't escape.bless our survivorsand bless our war babies.bless the stomachs that birthed us of landmines and starvation.bless the conditions that still leave us hungry,crying,begging for more.bless the boys I still love that only tried to kill me.bless the broken homes I've learned from.bless the men my mother only loved to keep us alive.bless this strategy.bless my former stepfather.the one that shattered the glass coffee table with his foot.how I wish it were my mouth then.bless my sister for finding me in the closet.the first fear I've ever felt.bless my second fear of being watched.bless my babysitter,and his newborn daughter.bless her the most.bless that he doesn't repeat history with his own kin.bless the men that were supposed to be my heroes,but bless them for the fucked-up things they have to live with.bless my brother,a true gentleman.bless this dance we were born to perform.how exhausting it is to do this to our bodies.to dance around death,but also,to survive. [End Page 112] dance, dance, dance my parents met in the dark while escaping the genocide.they relied on the reflection of the pale moon against their skin for guidance.dad said that mom was glowing like an angel. in the Cambodian culture,an apsara is a goddess of earth and water.they are heavenly dancers.I've learned about them to know what it means to be Cambodian.I've read somewhere thatapsaras are often the wives of musicians.I do not know if this is true,but it makes a lot of sense to me. back in the day,dad used to be quite the charmer.before the PTSD kicked in,he was a ghostwriter for the Cambodian music label,The Golden Butterfly. if you listen closely to all the albums,you'll know exactly which songs are about mom.she learned how to dance in a refugee camp in Thailand.she's never stopped practicing. it's been twenty years nowthat dad's been gone, but you can still hear his voice ringing in the hallway.a scratched vinyl on a broken record player,all your favorite cassette tapes stretched apart and thrown into the wood stove.I catch my mom dancing in the kitchen.she says, the acoustics here are the best. [End Page 113] dad is a distant choke gargling...
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