………….                                      ………To commemorate the victims of the Khmer Rouge

we faced a large number of classrooms
the bird outside faced the trees, unvoiced.
the winter’s soldier burns the classroom
changing our dream into a brimstone lake.
the bird still like stone, still watching blood
on her face. she wears the blade of clothes.
the bird lives here, dozing, but full of blood
sense in its eyes. we, trapped here. once
the classroom, the way turns to Pol Pot’s
…………                                 ……….political lab — S21.

everyone’s eyes as chameleons, fearing,
with the manic, immense sound of horns
for what is a revolutionary utopia, here.
the winter seems like a grand hot summer.
we cannot stand with chains that, like
a festering wound, are embedded in our skin.
outside the bird seems to happily live here,
when each one feels a death presentiment
that tastes the year, the month, the hour’s fear
as if this is the bird’s world. it waits to taste
congealed red jelly, oozing from corpses
in the black winter. the smiling, the smiling
……………                           …….Cambodian general secretary
in the photo, in every day and night,
casts a black hole, yet the bird cries within it,
as if untouched by the screams of the people.

Yucheng Tao is a Chinese poet and the editor of Argyle Literary Magazine. He serves as a reader for Palette Poetry. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Wild Court, and The Lake, among others.