As you retire your past
your unneeded insides
the garden you tend in
your Georgia home has grown
nearly a farm
promised apple trees you won’t see
for your granddaughters
to remember you by.
Sokunthary was born in a refugee camp in Thailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. They were sponsored to come to the United States and resettled in the Bronx where she grew up. She is currently poetry editor for Newtown Literary, the only literary journal for the borough of Queens, a founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), an adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, and the recent recipient of the American Opera Projects’ Composer and the Voice Fellowship for 2017-19. Her publication credits include Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time, FLESH, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Perigee, and The Margins. Her first collection of poetry, Apsara in New York, is available from Willow Books.
