The Fall of Saigon: Over the course of April 29, 1975 and into the following morning, Operation Frequent Wind transported more than 1,000 Americans and more than 5,000 Vietnamese out of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
Too hard to take her father’s blows for talking during the news so after 8 pm,
she moves to her room
slips into a narcotic haze.
After more chugs of cherry cough medicine,
the empty bottle glows:
Iridescent, a pale ruby cylinder.
Cuts across her wrist horizontally three times
with a rusty razor,
not knowing that vertical
is the way to go.
Blood barely blossoms from her shy left wrist.
********
This first-generation American girl is addicted to music
that spins on a spinach green record player from Sears.
She puts the needle down on the White Album:
Number 9 Number 9 Number 9
John Lennon says over and
over as she lies on the floor,
ear to the speaker
to float away from the war zone
created by parents
who survived wars themselves.
********
On the news that night, she saw Vietnamese
climb the embassy walls.
U.S. Marines slammed their gripping fingers with butts of guns,
watched men and women fall.
The reporter said one Vietnamese government official who was left behind
shot himself to death.
********
The girl imagines she is airlifted to another place
by grabbing hold of a magic helicopter,
ready to hang on like the Vietnamese people
who reached for the skids
of the last American chopper that took off in April ‘75
but were left behind: running, jumping, crying out.
********
Codeine makes the music rise like an aquamarine wave
and crash across her cheeks.
Then Jimi Hendrix comes back to life
to take her from this shell-shocked house
to a place where everything’s fluid and blue.
Jimi reels her into an etherized dream
where there’s a reunion with the dead
as he sings Castles Made of Sand.