Vathana Tells of Her Hunger

You ask me how my father died, and my relatives.
Starving  I tell you, all of them starving.
After the Khmer Rouge came, after my family
had been driven out with the others from Phnom Penh,
in my village there was never enough, only the thin
bowl of rice, a bit of fish, and sometimes not that.
The weak fell quickly, were struck
in the back of their heads, left to die in ditches,
or carried off into a night of snakes and tigers.

Such evil memories: men and women hanging 
from tree limbs, mangoes stuffed
into black mouth-holes, bodies on the ground,
their heads gaping beside them—
But it was always the hunger that hurt most,
my belly blown out like a pregnant woman, my hands
reaching for each stray bit of fruit.
Eat, eat, Id say to my sister, to my uncle
as they turned and tossed in the sweat of malaria.
Eat,  Id say to my father, back from the fields,
his face swollen, his bowels running out of him.

Before the Angkar (who sees everything
with the thousand eyes of the pineapple) forbade us
our Buddha, our pagodas and bonzes, Id learned well
the Noble Truths: All life is sorrow. Do not desire. 
Still I desired my life; I cherished
the silvery fish of the ponds, young green shoots
of the fields, the rice-wafer of moon above them.

If only there was not the hunger, and the hunger
turning to fear, the fear to anger in my stomach.
How I hated them, the Yotear, the Angkar,
all the men in black.  I hated how they made me scythe
the wide swaths of rice, how they starved or murdered,
one by one, my father, my uncle, the villagers
who disappeared in the loud night.

I feigned illness one noon and walked back
to the work camp, packed a few provisions
in a rush basket, and pretended to return
to the paddies, strolling out slowly beneath the eyes

of the guards. Once beyond them, I ran. Ran past rice silos,
fuel depots, into the forest, where spirits hovered
among the branches of the jacarandas, where snakes
coiled in every crevice.

I slept days, traveled, mostly in darkness,
across four provinces, wading calf-high in mud, bathing
in ponds, pulling off leeches.
And the hunger rose and fell in me, and the anger
was a steady fire.
I went on running and hiding all winter.

Here in America Ive borne a son, whose lashes
are long and dark. His name is Phan; he is two
and his eyes are so clear that I think
he has lived many lives.
I scrub for swan-white women in big houses
west of the city. But I am not safe from the hunger,
the anger that day and night roars like an underground fire.
It rises up like a dragon— and undoes me.

I trust no-one, will take nothing from anyone.
Is there no stopping this column of flame?
It threatens to swallow me whole like a mouse.
I fear for the son whom I love
beyond this life—beyond all life.
Day after day, he refuse to eat,
blood roars through my temples. I raise my hand at him.
I dig my fingernails into his arm and spoon the rice
as hard as I can against his locked lips.

 

© Patricia Fargnoli