Luku 1987
All my stories from māma begin with ceremony. Her warm leathery hands finger-skating on my eyelids’ domes. Dewy and pure, this was before they were slicked with grease from overactive adolescent pores. In a pickle-shaped island in the Pacific she will insist is not hers but ours, there is a bridge where the air is gift wrapped in a ribbon made of dragonflies. By bike, it is an exact four minute and three second ride. Measured by a Walkman passed through three generations of sisters playing see-uhn-dee lao-oh-purr’s “Time After Time.” The soft hissing of her accent reminisces and wishes she could have saved it, a photograph, at least, in the one good box in the house where she and Dad are preserved, sixteen and skinnier. Instead of Brahms, the lullaby of my own interrogation puts me to bed. Travelers overhead, did their wheels crunch against gravel like hard candy? If I whorled into a croissant of fleecy pajamas for dough and blankets for butter, would I sweat under the same afternoon heat that sweltered all summer? Was she so young she counted dragonflies like dollars, stopping at two hundred knowing every number after was just another alias for infinity? Did the sunlight glint off their blue-green backs like Oakleys I’ve seen when the lawn men come to mow? Does the rum-chukka-chukka, rum chukka-chukka of the midnight freights sound like water she used to know? I rush to tell her at breakfast, every piece of nothing I have discovered that is responsible for everything, sans tinfoil hat and with overcompensating childhood earnestness, about French pastries and redneck sunglasses and coal trains and Jolly Rancher rocks. Over white rice dolloped with a spoon of ground pork she does not spare me the reality of governmental infrastructure, the eventuality of little rivers drained, pumped, and paved. Why cry over insects which I have never known alive? But tears come easy without understanding how to return to a memory like her. Without the need for metaphor.
Siete Lin is a queer Taiwanese writer working in the American South. Their work has been published in Free the Verse and Eunoia Review.