Melissa R. Sipin
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You were born in September
For Mela
We stand in a white room in your father’s house at the end of the peninsula. We cover your home with violets and azaleas, they crowd the front porch, the living room, the four-shelved bookcase, the bathroom, the kitchen. The windows are open, and we smell the waft of waves pushing us open. “There are just so many flowers.” What to do with the flowers? “There are just so many flowers.”
In Los Angeles, the weather is infused with heat and sun. There’s just so many flowers. These are our words for death, for loss, the silences between our laughter and grief. The vibrant lilies and orchids bend their faces toward us, and we sing with our bellies, turning to the open sea.
Sometimes the most bittersweet and beautiful thing is to make potpourri in the winter. The smells, the touch of a broken rose, the velvety colors of the petals, the dousing of salt to suck the water out, the transformation of life to embalmed death. We take your ashes and hold them in a white, porcelain heart-shaped vase. Half a year has passed, and it is snowing across the country. I face another sea, frozen and unbroken. I look out the window and the blanket of white brings me back to you, the forty minutes of breath you lived, the candle I light nearby the dried up flowers, the countless petals, the fragrance of you. I ask your father what he will do with the flowers. There are just so many flowers. We can make potpourri, I say. Salt. Vinegar. Flesh out all the water. The snow keeps falling. The sun asleep. The moon, too, thinks of salting out the sea. A way to return to you. We run dry of words. We empty out our voices. Salt out the words, dry them all out.
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Nicknamed "small but terrible" by her lola, Melissa R. Sipin was born and raised in Carson, CA. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014) and is Editor-in-Chief of TAYO Literary Magazine. Her work is in Guernica Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and PEN American Center, among others. Her fiction has won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review's Flash Fiction Prize, as well as scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Poets & Writers Inc., Kundiman, VONA/Voices Writers' Workshop, Squaw Valley’s Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is hard at work on a novel, really loves yellow mangoes, and strictly believes you're finally home when you've found your favorite Chinese delivery restaurant and a parking ticket on your car's window dash. More at: www.msipin.com.