After your Yeh Yeh passed, I started spending more time with Pu Dara. I’m not sure if you remember him– he’s the one with a stub for an arm. In his youth, he was particularly charismatic–whenever we were out on the town, he’d stop practically every five minutes because he had run into someone he knew. Things changed after the war, though. He’d told me stories of what it was like alone in the Killing Fields–how he’d lost half his right forearm and hand to a stray mine, how he’d eaten live grasshoppers and scorpions to stay alive. He says when he bites into potato chips now, he flinches, in fear he’s mistaken the chips for grasshoppers, expecting the exoskeletons to crack out from under his teeth and the wings to flap frantically in his mouth. When he came to the U.S., he started working at a mechanic shop, always coming back from work covered in grease and oil. We’d play klah klok, a betting game. It has a mat with six symbols on it, accompanied by a die with the same symbols: a rooster, fish, prawn, tiger, crab, and gourd. The goal of the game is to successfully predict which symbol the die will land on. One day, I bet $100 on fish and won. Instead of asking for the money, I asked if he wanted to man the register at the donut shop. We’d been working together ever since. He always came in a few minutes late, throwing an apron on before grabbing an old-fashioned donut from under the counter.
Maya Cheav is the author of the poetry chapbooks LYKAIA (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and TAN’S DONUTS (Chestnut Review, 2025). Her poems and flash fiction have been featured in Stone of Madness, ALOCASIA, Scapegoat Review, The Weaver, Across the Margin, and elsewhere. Her work has received a Best Small Fictions Nomination. She was a top 10 finalist for the 2023 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize, guest judged by Danez Smith, as well as a 2024 Tin House Workshop alum, under the faculty mentorship of Roy G. Guzmán. She is a 2024-2025 Collections of Transience poet in residence.
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