Bunkong Tuon
Eating Donuts with my son at Dunkin’
after Kevin Prufer
This is our ritual.
My son eats his donut, and I marvel at him.
*
It is our post-pandemic ritual,
a reward for going to school,
for seeing his speech therapist.
I too was school-afraid, world-afraid,
afraid to be separated from Lok-Yeay.
*
Outside schoolchildren get off the bus.
Some run, some walk,
laughing and chattering,
backpacks bopping toward home.
One of the schoolkids runs to his dad
who bends down and hugs him.
The father and son are walking down
the sidewalk talking like old friends.
*
And the wind blows
clouds moving across the cold sky,
brown leaves swirling under an oak tree.
What else is there but to think
about my father on this autumn day?
He who was taken away from
forty years ago after the war.
Was I a marvel to him?
I have no memory of being held,
sitting on his lap,
no memory of being lifted to the sky
in sweet fatherly pride.
*
I wish I had something, anything,
so I can father my own son
without this empty shadow,
large, impenetrable, aching.
*
My son turns the donut around
with his hand, marvels at the glazed Saturn.
He lowers his head and closes his eyes
as he licks the chocolate frosting.
*
This is our ritual.
My son eats his donut, and I marvel at him.
My Neighbor’s Plea to his Children
Don’t utter the names of
Ancestors
Don’t look
For family albums
Don’t ask questions
Let’s keep the bones in the basement
Lest we risk unleashing demons
The haunting complicity of
Our family’s survival
On “My Neighbor’s Plea to His Children”: Growing up, I heard stories of former Khmer Rouge who sought shelter in the camps in Thailand, living among their victims, other Cambodian refugees. I thought about them leading quiet lives in the States. I also thought about family members and neighbors who didn’t want to talk about life under Pol Pot. And I wondered what they had to do to survive.
The poem is ambivalent as to the true identity of the “neighbor.”
On “Eating Donuts with my son at Dunkin’”: As a child survivor of the Cambodian genocide, I grew up without parents. Now that I’m a parent, I raise my kids, consciously or unconsciously, in the shadow of Pol Pot.
Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize-winning poet, and professor at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. He is the author of several poetry collections. In 2024, he published What Is Left, a Greatest Hits chapbook from Jacar Press, and Koan Khmer, his debut novel from Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. He lives with his wife and children in Upstate New York.