The photograph shows the lines
on his back in morning light,
the misspelled Khemer Pride tat
a gut punch, an alphabet soup
of tangled ethnolinguistic ghosts.
I have met other Cambodian parents
and have seen the trying-to-forget
in their eyes. Those 1970s horrors
boxed up in far away corners we
try to burn to dust in our minds.
Thailand born, boyhood in
Philly streets, now deported
to Cambodia, a place he’d never
seen. No light in his sternum
in dreamless days and nights.
Address Not Found inked
on his many-stamped envelope.
Like a rejected parcel, his stories
follow a familiar displacement arc
told in many accents across time.
His departures not caused by natural
disasters, but those of the man-made
kind—politics, fear, hate. Undelivered,
he looks toward the sun, but his back
and our quiet shame can’t be erased.
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