Khmer | Bridal Mask Speak

When I torch a rice storehouse, I am chanting: (Kom phlech) Do not forget.

Instead, find a quiet corner of a forgotten market. Listen to the old women selling radishes. They are speaking it. The old language. The one the colonizers could not brand. It sounds like: Bridal Mask Speak Khmer

I hide in the alleys of my own city like a comma in a sentence that refuses to end. The Japanese think I am a ghost. The communists think I am a traitor playing dress-up. My own mother, if she were alive, would not recognize my shadow. Good. Let her not. Because the boy who loved her is buried under a railway bridge, his mouth stuffed with surrender. When I torch a rice storehouse, I am

Tonight, I will kill again. A collaborator. A professor who teaches Korean children to hate their own shadows. Afterward, I will leave a single jasmine flower on his chest. Not for him. For the soil. For the proof that something soft can still grow from something rotten. They are speaking it

(Khnhom s’abt anak) I hate you.