Tuol Sleng - 2010 Poem by peauladd huy

(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.