REVERSE EVALUATION > POETRY
after Asa Drake
Sunlight fills our old house. I imagine you in the bedroom we used to share, jumping on the bed in your striped pajamas. Last night, I stood in the street and gazed at the darkened window up above, heart heavy with the reason we no longer live inside.
I dread the day I will look like our mother, but I know that day is as inevitable as the looming future of reproductive cloning or artificial intelligence. Remember how the cast and crew of our first (and last) TV show always said our features were like miniature echoes of hers?
I am a legal adult now, old enough to make my own decisions about all kinds of things. But I still wore a birthday crown at my party and blew out the candles like we did when we were kids. Except, for the fifth year in a row, you weren’t standing there beside me.
After your death, every time she looked at me, I’m almost certain she saw you. I’m almost certain because every time I looked in the mirror, I saw you, too.
All I want is to know dreams without adults who linger in the shadows; puppeteers pulling our strings. I don’t have to ask our mother what she dreams. She dreams the lamp in our bedroom still shines. She lives in a place where the bulb will never go out.
In my dreams, though, she can’t find our earliest headshots. Like all things I don’t want to remember, I’ve hidden them somewhere they’ll never be found.
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her literary/visual art has appeared in over a hundred publications. She loves to dance.
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