kim phuc running

and then came the crying. the flood. the great deluge that wiped out the wicked, killing almost everything on earth. it started when laureliza came to my door this morning and pulled me out of the hell of my apartment- a wreckage that would have made tracey emin's bed look like martha stewart's rose garden. empty forty bottles and crushed pills and blood stained underwear and used pregnancy tests and bibles and mad-scribbled poems of dark winged things that don't/can't exist to the living. i must have looked like a baby bird before its time, quivering breathless, broken from the egg prematurely by a cruel child called god/universe/greatspirit, whatever you choose. she lifted me slowly and softly. she asked me how i was feeling and my dam of toppled female statues crumbled. the pain pushed its watery way through my facade of strength and the crying that's been coming came, it came hard. i gave it all to her and she took it.

tonight i lay in the dark of my bedroom waiting for morning, listening to tori amos's mother over and over again until cat power sneaks in and says, "brother is old and grey brother is old and grey brother is old and grey. he's only seventeen." i think of my brother's tired eyes and bloated alcoholic face, still so handsome, never had a chance, standing in the hospital as he tells me what he thinks of our mother's addiction. a janitor stops pushing her cart and comes over to us. she tells my brother he is an amazing speaker and he should lead meetings. he doesn't smile. he nods. i think about the irony. my brother, the funniest man alive, the great talker of republic and what's his calling? to be a speaker at an alcoholics anonymous meeting. i think about my family.

we are a whole spectrum of labels and statistics. my older sister was a teen mom. now she's a single mom on welfare and addicted. my brother's an alcoholic, ex-marine, survivor. my mother's on SSI. we're all certified mentally ill and going nowhere. we're all drowning in pain. i work at a coffee shop where rich kids sit and study for law exams and the hatred i feel is acute, enough to burn a hole through my midsection, one big enough for them to stick their faces through like a carnival cardboard cutout. they can put their heads in, smell the death and despair, smile for a picture and say, "see, mom, we're poor!"

i find out yesterday my best friend of a lifetime started turning tricks to feed her kids. she's not the first, but i've loved her the longest. it's not sex work, it's not sex-radical, it's fucking sad. it's tragic. and it's poverty, so you'll never hear her story in any traveling roadshow. i visit home and drink by the river with hard boys who have my dead friends' names tattooed on their biceps. we're celebrating my cousin's promotion at long john silver's. we stand around a fire singing, "let it be" by the beatles. my brother's eyes are closed. this is the song that was playing in bootcamp when he wanted to kill himself and white light flooded his vision and saved his life. we're mystics. exposure to stress for extended periods of time can do that to ya. this song's become a family anthem of sorts. my mom and i sang it in the car on the way to visit nina in western psych last time. never had a chance, not a one of us.

nina walks through the metal detector at the hospital the first night in the E.R. and the guard tells her to take everything out of her pockets. she grabs a fistful of change, unknowingly grabbing a little plastic container of red glitter she had in her pocket. it bursts everywhere. there's red glitter all over the place. all over us, all over the guards, the floor. i think of frida kahlo's accident, when she laid naked, covered in blood and gold dust, with a rail straight up her vagina and the crowd shrieked, "cover the beautiful dancer! cover the beautiful dancer!" i tell nina to just go, to just walk through the fucking metal detector. the guards stare at us and our stress like we are from another planet and i wish just once we wouldn't be so weird. so noticeably strange.

i listen to a pretty song in my bedroom when the sun starts to come up. it's about young lovers and it's so beautiful, so innocent and made of good stuff, like drunken sunrises and mixtapes and the first learning of another body. i cry thinking of all the beautiful things my mother can't have- like sex. i think of her body, so thin, so sick, and i know she hasn't had sex in so long. i see happy, healthy middle aged women at whole foods and i am so jealous i can't see straight. i'm so jealous of everyone with a healthy mother. i see little rich kids and i don't think they're cute. their mothers smile at me when one runs his baby cart into my shin and i don't smile back. i'm dead cold. my mother is losing her mind slowly and all i can do is watch it happen and remember when her hair was red and her lips were full and her skin glowed with sophistication and health before her husband and kids stigmatized her addiction and collectively agreed upon and made her feel like an asshole. what a terrible thing to know- that the fruit of thy womb thinks you're pathetic. what a terrible terrible thing.

maybe curses are true. nina and i sat on my dad's couch watching everyone sit silently, uncomfortably, not knowing what to say to each other. nina leans in and whispers to me that erick told her that monks in vietnam put curses on the soldiers. elaborate curses intended to curse their families for generations. my dad was an assassin in the Phoenix Squad which wiped out thousands of vietnamese people- civilians, too. It was called one of the deadliest operations in U.S. history before international human rights agencies found out about it and the C.I.A had to cancel the program and cover up the evidence.

maybe it's true. maybe we're cursed and i'm guilty and the universe won't be satisfied until i'm kim phuc running eternally in my own bad dream.

and maybe i can catch up to her. maybe i can cover her naked, still burning skin with my father's blood in my body. maybe i'll tell her he was just a boy, that he was poor and got drafted, that he didn't know any better.

maybe i'll visit vietnam and find a shaman to undo the curse. i'll make an offering and pray for months until the land has forgiven me and the wandering ancestor spirits have granted my pardon.

maybe i'll call the offering, "a flower of peace for my Phoenix" and it will mean more than what it seems. it will mean i'm flying up from the fire like my father did for years

and i'm taking everyone i love with me.