“I love the smell of napalm…”: Remix

a golden shovel

Did I see napalm explode? All the time! Napalm
in the early days of the war. I was without a son—
to that German convent! Nothing 
was left of my grandfather’s home. What else?
Where in my too-large hands? In
the hallway, Bê sang to him but couldn’t calm the
word. Na Pom. Oh. Yes, the bombed world.
Here in Sài Gòn, her body still smells
of powdered milk. It was like 
a spent match. When my wife woke from the coma, it was her smile that
swelled under my watch. Once, a South Vietnamese soldier, I
was diagnosed tim yêú. My body betrayed the love.
He was shot by the Việt Cộng. I watched. The
hospital had already buried—I remember my daughter’s smell
of the damp paddy, I hear the voice of
myself on a film set. I was the Việt Cộng. I was the scenery. “Napalm”
-thick, mucous-bright hair. Around her seemed a corona. Palm 
reader predicted that I would suffer. In
my fists. Couldn’t sleep last night. Who could sleep through a strafing, the
mud. I mapped our escape. We’d leave when the rain halted in the early morning.

Live-Stream

Keep watch. Turn the camera.
Dilate. In our hundreds, 
our thousands. Our millions.

Eaten. Have you? Slept? 
To the activists who fought 
for me. Did my family 

die less? Are families dying 
less today, as I send poetry money
to buy food and tents?

Last year, the average 
American paid $5,109 
to the U.S. military. 

Death could not be funded 
without us. In our thousands.
Our millions. Our munitions.

I go to the literary 
nonprofit party. 
I smile into the camera.

Step and repeat.
I touch phones, 
exchange contacts. 

What does our refusal
look like? Over plates 
of donated cheese and wine. 

Over the meat of a killed lamb. 
If I can eat, I must ask. Have you?
Eaten yet? Slept? 

I, in my warm 
rent-stabilized apartment, 
my radiator heat. 

You, wet through the winter.
Turn the camera, 
back and forth.

—

From the karaoke room,
I sing, 
I will survive. 

I was barred 
from learning 
music

by my mother, 
who tabulated 
the cost 

of violin rentals 
and after-school lessons
against the labor 

of each dress
she assembled. 
I have chased music 

my whole life. Learned 
from my nerdy friends 
in a public library 

how to bounce 
my shoulders, 
roll my hips. 

Now, I’m in love 
with a composer.
He sees a guitar 

and hears sound.
I see language 
as syllabics 

and breath,
two bodies moving 
balletically past 

one another 
inside my bathroom’s 
narrow strictures. 

At protests, 
he’d beat the drums
as the students marched 

demanding answers 
for what happened 
to the disappeared. 

Music, 
the heartbeat 
of a movement. 

—

Our dead on screen,
a freeze, a scroll. 
Journalists hungry,

but reporting. 
I weigh my eating 
at a restaurant 

against helping 
someone else eat. 
Sometimes, 

I stay home. Sometimes, 
I watch my credit 
balloon, and collect 

reading fees and jurying,
banking this against 
a zero interest card 

that will charge 22% 
come June. I have read 
the budget proposal,

the cost of dropping bombs 
on five countries, 
disinvestment, 

collapsing tourism,
start-up capital withering, 
credit downgrade.

I join your risk 
so that you 
are less alone.

Turn 
the camera,
back and forth. 

I write to you 
from the afterlife
of near-annihilation. 

Excerpted from BECOMING GHOST: Poems by Cathy Linh Che. Copyright 2025 © by Cathy Linh Che. Reprinted by permission of Washington Square Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.