"If I don’t show, you will not see" - Poem by Peauladd Huy

If I don’t show, you will not see

Poem by Peauladd Huy

I don’t blame you for all your reasons: if I were you I wouldn’t

want me to see that person either. It’s a lot to take after thirty something years:

hard time has ravaged my physical.

But hey, my inner spirit is still the same. I am still that kid

growing. Waiting.

Did you know I was very close

to being done with many times during those hard interrogations?

Beaten unconscious

meant for the last time. My father had already left in a pushcart

to his isolation cell because he was unable to collaborate any names

other than those spewed out because of some pain

after each kick to his vital parts.

Let that traitor die a slow death I heard one said through my mother’s panting.

Let’s try her was the last thing I heard, and then, angry commotions –

sloshing was drowning everything out.

Many days now from when it all ended for us,

I’ve returned day to day to the site, waiting

for someone to notice me, to let their eyes

stray my way, to really see

more than just my incomplete

bones scattering along my mother’s

lower spine. See there.

See how I’d bitten back

the pain, when the guards

savagely kicked

my mother’s swollen belly.

Imagine her ripe belly.

It was me in there.