Lee Ann Roripaugh

For my mother, Yoshiko Horikoshi Roripaugh 1.X-Ray My mother carried the chest x-ray in her lap on the plane, inside a manila envelope that read Do Not Bend and, garnished with leis at the Honolulu Airport, waited in line—this strange image of ribcage, chain-link vertebrae, pearled milk of lung, and the murky enigmatic chambers of her heart in hand. Until it was her turn and the immigration officer held the black-and-white film up to sun, light pierced clean through her, and she was ushered from one life through the gate of another, wreathed in the dubious and illusory perfume of plucked orchids. 2.Ceramic Pig Newly arrived in New Mexico, stiff and crisp in new dungarees, her honeymoon, they drove into the mountains in a borrowed car, spiraling up and up toward the rumor of deer, into the green tangy turpentine scent of pine, where air crackled with the sizzling collision of bees, furred legs grappling velvet bodies as they mated midair, and where they came upon the disconsolate gaze of a Madonna alcoved against the side of the road, her feet wreathed in candles, fruit, flowers, and other offerings. Nearby, a vendor with a wooden plank balanced between two folding chairs and the glossy row of ceramic pigs lined up across, brilliant glaze shimmering the heat. My mother fell in love with the red- and-blue splash of flowers tattooed into fat flanks and bellies, the green arabesques of stem and leaf circling hoof, snout, and ear.So exotic. Years later she still describes the pig with a sigh—heartbroken, the word she chooses with careful consideration. She’d filled the pig with Kennedy dollars from the grocery budget, each half dollar a small luxury denied at the local Piggly Wiggly, until one day, jingling the shift and clink of the pig’s growing silver weight, she shook too hard, and as if the hoarded wealth of her future were too much to contain, the pig broke open—spilling coins like water, a cold shiny music, into her lap— fragments of bright pottery shards scattering delicate as Easter eggshell. 3.Sneeze My mother sneezes in Japanese.Ké-sho! An exclamation of surprise—two sharp crisp syllables before pulling out the neatly folded and quartered tissue she keeps tucked inside the wrist of her sweater sleeve. Sometimes, when ragweed blooms, I wonder why her sneeze isn’t mine, why something so involuntary, so deeply rooted in the seed of speech, breaks free from my mouth like thistle in a stiff breeze, in a language other than my mother’s tongue. How do you chart the diaspora of a sneeze?I don’t know how you turned out this way

I always forget the name, delphinium, even though it was the flower the hummingbirds loved best. They came in pairs—sleek, emerald-bright heads, the clockwork machinery of their blurred wings thrumming swift, menacing engines. They slipped their beaks. as if they were swizzle sticks, deep into the blue throat of delphinium and sucked dry the nectar- chilled hearts like goblets full of sweet, frozen daiquiri. I liked to sit on the back porch in the evenings, watching them and eating Spanish peanuts, rolling each nut between thumb and forefinger to rub away the red salty skin like brittle tissue paper, until the meat emerged gleaming, yellow like old ivory, smooth as polished bone. And late August, after exclamations of gold flowers, tiny and bitter, the caragana trees let down their beans to ripen, dry, and rupture— at first there was the soft drum of popcorn, slick with oil, puttering some- where in between seed, heat, and cloud. Then sharp cracks like cap gun or diminutive fireworks, caragana peas catapulting skyward like pellet missiles. Sometimes a meadowlark would lace the night air with its elaborate melody, rippling and sleek as a black satin ribbon. Some- times there would be a falling star. And because this happened in Wyoming, and because this was my parents’ house, and because I’m never happy with anything, at any time, I always wished that I was some- where, anywhere else, but here.

People traveled from miles away to see my paintings of fish— the jeweled armor of their scales, the beadlike set of their eyes in rubbery socket rings, the glimmering swish of fin and tail so real it seemed that you could almost dip a net deep into the paper and pull up the arching wet weight of a golden carp, a shiny trout, or the dark muscular heft of a bass with its mouth stretched into the surprised, wiry “oh” of a child’s wind sock. I captured my models from the sea, lake, and goldfish pond in the back garden, so careful not to let their mouths be torn by the hook, their scales chipped, or the silky tissue of their tails ripped by a clumsy hand. I kept them in large glass bowls, fed them mosquito wings or dry silkworm pupas offered from chopsticks, and when I was finished making sketches, I quickly took them back and set them free again. Every night I dream I swim with these fish as a golden carp—black spots on cloisonné scales, pulled to the surface by the deceptive creamy luster of the moon or the sizzle of firefly lights across the water. And every night I am tempted once again by the smell of the baited hook, by my predictable hunger for earthly things, and each time I am surprised again by the stinging hook in my lip that pulls me mercilessly into the bright air, setting my gills on fire, the sharp, silver pain of the knife that slits me open so easily from tail to throat to reveal the scarlet elastic of my raw gills, the translucent film of my air sac, the milky rise of my stomach, and the gray marbled coil of my intestines. I rise late each day, and work in brighter light. When I die, I will have my paintings brought down to the lake and slipped into the water. First the edges of ink will blur, and then there will be a great flurry as the fins, tails, and bodies begin blossoming in- to life again, each fish detaching from its canvas of silk or rice paper—a swirl of color, motion, swimming away.