Portrait of D17: Female, 37 Years Old

In Phnom Penh’s museum, the skulls are stacked in aquarium tanks: grim toys for hooks to ply free from the rubble. Here, each one gets a tag, a mount, a photograph to suggest a life, perhaps a name, might be envisioned. Yet I’m more moved by what’s anonymous, past; imagine fields of faces sunken with decay, eyes jellied in their sockets, heel meats bruised, bloated in the rain— Perhaps the skulls prefer a lack of names as, scrubbed of self and skin, they’re trauma’s best witnesses: fused by time and pain to one crisis, never to be separated. Lost as men, they become event. in this, they achieve a terrible transcendence.