I love the smell of napalm...

                              a golden shovel

Did I see napalm explode? All the time! Napalm
flames, their greasy fingers in the air. I wasn’t a son
drafted into the war, just a daughter to marry off. After Americans arrived, nothing
was left of my grandfather’s home. What else
do you expect when tanks roll in?
Translate the
word. Na Pom. Oh. Yes, the bombed world.
Today, I enter my garden, teeming with smells,
basil and lemongrass. Dragon fruit climbing over the trellis, reptile-like,
waxy and succulent. Guava that
swells under my watch. Once, a South Vietnamese soldier––I
knew him around the village––stumbled into our home. War takes everything we love.
He was shot by the Việt Cộng. I watched the
man bleed out into the sheets. It was the fresh smell
of death that got me. Flash forward: Scene of
myself on a film set. I was the Việt Cộng. I was the scenery. “Napalm”
explodes up. I heard bom, bom, bom shaking in
my fists. Couldn’t sleep last night. Who could sleep through a strafing, the
sounds echoing bom, bom, bom, from that day, into this morning.



Reprinted from Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025). Reprinted with the permission of the author.