preceding a prayer for the dead asian men who inspired a nightmare on elm street
Khairani Barokka
americana churns a grist of slashes and fear of the faces it burns spits out a recurring broadcast of freddy on screens in formation, grenade-fuelled having claimed that if you slept you’d die unwaking, you fled rose to an observatory height watching as agent orange held tight to blood molecules as the bombs that made you run to a cold stretch of states continued to bloom death in home soils that noticed you depart as mines and sweatshops back home were squeezed for gleaming suburbs that continue to laugh at the accents with which you prayed, to avoid terror under empire-moon as suited men determined these present, pixeled mausolea where hollow memory-conscribers confined traces of your bones to blades seeking ingenue flesh
where are your hands in this celluloid and how were they positioned the overseers grasped at, sought to break your minds’ eye in a cycle of VHS-led obliteration vastly beyond any vengeance your sleep could imagine flinging the cause of your desperate leaving to an unfurling exploit of further nightmares
[A Nightmare on Elm Street was inspired by 1980s reports of dozens of Southeast Asian men in the US—refugee men in particular, who had fled from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and especially those from Hmong communities—dying in their sleep, with many having reported nightmares. Medical professionals called this Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS).]
