by Madison Root
In memory of the Tuol Sleng victims.
(With the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, about twenty thousand prisoners were tortured and executed in the Cambodian Genocide in the Tuol Seng prison.)
They have given most two months to live,
As most die this way, they die.
I don’t even know the answer to the questions.
Shutter of the camera truly holds you captive,
The nameless faces–the faceless, bleeding million–scattered through
fields.
Click.
Dragged by beaten ankles, swollen limbs, shielded eyes,
By the purged and twisted miscreants of society.
Stripped raw, prickling skin from cold and uncertainty,
Asking names, demanding, drowning me.
Click.
I haven’t had clean water touch my skin or my throat for days now.
Talk, beaten, don’t struggle, you’ll be beaten, I know it.
My wrists subsiding against thick metal bars,
Spine etched in stomach lining, skull pulsating, numb.
My cellmate committed suicide,
What luck, what luck,
Click.
Deathless dead, objects of trial,
Bleeding drop by drop from malnourished, yellow bodies,
Watching slowly how long until bled out,
Drip, drip blood out from collapsed purple veins,
Squeezing slowly, slowly,
Before unmoved eyes.
Click.
Electrical current jolting faint hearts, filling them up,
Delicate red fiber pulled apart.
Thick blistering metal fusing to weak flesh,
Hanging, suffocated, drowning,
Click.
Delicately extracting fingernails from their beds,
Nerve by nerve, blood inducing rip,
Drenched, submerged in searing alcohol.
My cellmate was raped yesterday, she was raped,
Forcibly penetrated multiple ways, multiple times,
And they killed her,
The officer, and her, it was immoral,
Click.
Neatly tracing lines up the stomach and chest,
Revealing fresh organs, beating heart, the working kidney,
No anesthesia.
Thinly slicing layers of remaining skin, exposing muscle,
Alive, no anesthesia,
Click.
