Bridal Mask Speak Khmer -

(Bong bros) Brother.

(Khnhom s’abt anak) I hate you.

I am not a hero.

When I cut the throat of a Kempeitai officer, I am whispering: (Mean tae sereipheap te) There is only freedom. Bridal Mask Speak Khmer

But why Khmer? you ask. Why the tongue of a distant, also-colonized people? Because they understand. Because when the French came for their temples, they did not bow. They hollowed out their own gods and hid them in caves. Because their word for “tomorrow” is the same as their word for “resistance.” I borrowed their alphabet because my own was being erased. I wear their vowels like hidden grenades.

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.

(Ar kun) – Thank you. “ស្រឡាញ់” (Sralanh) – Love. “សងសឹក” (Sang seuk) – Revenge. (Bong bros) Brother

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

I am a wound that learned to walk. I am the missing page from the history book. I am the scream that your governor’s son hears just before the lights go out. And when I speak now, I do not speak Japanese. I do not speak the tongue of the occupier. I speak the language of the knife.

The Laughing Magpie’s Last Will

Now I speak only in acts.

(Khnhom jea kon Khmer) I am a child of the earth. (The unbreakable one.)

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 cut the throat of a Kempeitai