Childhood Poem by peauladd huy

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,
Mother will come back soon.
She’s not killed.