child of the enemy

I’ve seen thousands of Amerasians, and I have two Amerasian [children] of my own. Amerasians are willful and stubborn. They have serious identity problems. They have no discipline. Down the street at the Floating Hotel you’ll find Amerasian prostitutes plying their mothers’ trade. I think there’s a racial thing here, something genetic. 

—an American ex-soldier as quoted in Vietamerica

III. Child of the Enemy

a. 

I was born with a twelfth hole. Instantly

the floating world carved its shame

on the dark meat of my face. A love child, child of perfidy, allegiance

           split like a door.

I was born a traitor in the month of Cancer, the white phosphorus

pungent, knowing.

b. 

1973. The rice winnows out like shrapnel. Before it’s over

there are fifty thousand new hostilities, each birthed face inimical

as our fathers stealing home.

c. 

Think of the places women dilate. Beds. Barns. Saigon’s streets.

No good Samaritan comes forward and only the moon like a platoon 

treacherously approaching, its extended hand like a speculum, the better

to illuminate, disgrace.

                                                                                                                  d.

                                                                                      Or more importantly

the places women leave. An unsuspecting caretaker. The bacterial streets.

                                                                                                           Or

                                                  perhaps the unspeakable pitch into burlap

and water.        A gulf off the South China Sea where another sinking form

is anyone’s guess.

e.

That time Tet fell in the year of the snake. As in reptilian. As in 

no turning back. As in when I became

a child of containment. As in how like a monetary policy

I was loosed to an existence feral as a raised bayonet. As in

what the serpent might say: knowledge for knowledge’s sake

is both industrial and complex.

f.

At birth

I was swaddled

in a blanket. Pink

wool. Threadbare.

Like everything else

moth-eaten.

Man-made.

g. 

Before the last vertical bird lifted like a gurney out of April

and twenty years clotted to a tumor brilliant as a stuck fish

and the dreams began in which you saw yourself as the killer

of trees, before the army finally said it was something in the water

and orange came to be the cloak of mourning, tell me soldier:

who taught you to love like a man, you with nowhere to go

but tacitly free?