Lee Ann Roripaugh on

DANDARIANS (Milkweed Editions, 2014)

 Dandarians was written largely between 2008-2011. The title poem of Dandarians, “The Planet of Dandar,” is the first in a series of five lyric flash memoir pieces that explore what I like to think of as “word betrayals”—words (mis)transmitted to me from my first-generation Japanese mother that took on their own powerful signification and became richly connotative and symbolically fertile or even, at times, dangerously toxic. Dandarians (dan-dare-ee-uns) was how my mother pronounced the word dandelions, and for me, the word sounded like a science fiction alien, hailing from a radioactive yellow planet, struggling in the diaspora of otherness.

 I feel as if in many respects the book is about vulnerability, alienated others, and the possibilities/impossibilities of language—both the ways in which we are inscribed by and contained, or even caged, within language, as well as the lovely ways in which we so desperately yearn to connect and (mis)communicate with one another through language.  

  “Your Ghost” by Kristin Hersh

Language, too, can mark us as vulnerable and other: either through naming, categorizing, and thereby symbolically “mastering”/controlling our difference, or through making us feel raw, and mollusk-without-a-shell-ish when we disclose our desires and needs; when we “talk back” and say no; or when we name the traumas that we are haunted by. When Kristin Hersh sings:

“It’s the blaze across my nightgown / It’s the phone’s ring / I think last night / you were driving circles around me”

in her voice of pure raw honey, it’s the swirled boa of fog that parabolas the empty small-town street, the chilled glass spin of marbles on hardwood floors that keep the speaker of Dandarians awake and obsessively in dialogue with her anxious ghosts at night.

 “Subterranean Homesick Alien” by Radiohead

I grew up as other in small-town Wyoming, in a home treacherously land-mined with emotional violence and silenced secrets—a landscape I feel can be captured by the dreamy melancholy of Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien”:

“Up above / Aliens hover / Making home movies / For the folks back home / Of all these weird creatures / Who lock up their spirits / Drill holes in themselves / And live for their secrets.”

 “Earthcrosser” by Veruca Salt

At age 9, I was molested by an 18-year-old boy who lived across the street from me and continued to live across the street from me until I left home for college. My parents blamed me, shaming me for what happened, saying that I should have been able to identify that his gun wasn’t a “real” gun, and later on saying that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone what had happened to me. And even though I outwardly continued to dutifully perform in the all the ways upon which my parents’ love felt conditional (winning piano competitions, excelling in academics) after that, no place felt emotionally safe for me, and I felt further marked, silenced, anxious, and isolated.  Maybe the soundtrack for that self, in that time, would have been Veruca Salt’s “Earthcrosser”:

“Sleep little flea, / little boy me. A freak. / Am I clean, flea/ I feel like men, / (flea, little flea, little boy) / I feel like boys, think I’m peeling. / And the ringing in my ears / from playing too loud / I hear the ocean / I hear the crowd.”

 “Red Planet (Live)” by Eric Dolphy

I dreamed constantly of escape, maybe back to my home planet of Dandar, or perhaps to the fractured, envelope-pushing, weird spaces of Eric Dolphy’s “Red Planet.”

 “Black Hole Hunter” by Rasputina

Or maybe of escaping to somewhere darker—spiderwebbed with a lacy self-destructive edge, more of a voyage to the inner radioactive core of repressed self, as in Rasputina’s “Black Hole Hunter”:

“The remnant of a collapsed and molten core / A curious breed of galaxy never seen before / No longer able to support its mass / It’s unleashed ten thousand-trillion watts of noxious gas.”

 “Riding on the Rocket” by Shonen Knife

Or perhaps even escaping by hitching a ride onto the mod retro kawaii punk spaceship of Shonen Knife’s “Riding on the Rocket” from Let’s Knife:

“Riding on the rocket, I wanna go to Pluto / Space foods are marshmallow, asparagus and ice cream / Blue eyed cat said, ‘Let me go with you’ / Let’s go let’s go let’s go with me”

 “Crane Wife” by The Decemberists

Summer 2008, and I’m driving to Wyoming to visit my parents in the home where I grew up. It will be the first time I’ve gone home in over seven years. As I descend through the foothills, silver-bellied rainclouds move sleekly and rapidly across the mountain range, occasionally broken through by spears of sunlight. I’m listening to The Decemberists, and something about Colin Meloy’s open pure voice, or maybe it’s that I read somewhere that he’s originally from Montana, suits the enormous scale of sky, clouds, and mountains. I love the song “Crane Wife,” because it’s based on a traditional Japanese folk tale, an animal bride myth, that I remember from my childhood, in which a hunter rescues an injured crane, who then appears on his doorstep in the form of a woman. They are very poor, and so at night, she shape-shifts back into a crane and makes beautiful blankets out of the feathers from her breast that he can sell for money. When he discovers her secret, that she is really the crane that he rescued, she disappears. Perhaps this is a story about vulnerability, false selves, and secrets. I also associate it with my mother: the bags of Tsuru-Mai rice she buys, the fact that as I child, when I saw the crane logo on her Japan Airlines ticket, I thought that she traveled to America on the back of a crane.  The visit is devastatingly disastrous and I haven’t been back since:

“There’s a bend in the wind and it rakes at my heart / There is blood in the thread and it rakes at my heart”

 “Artichoke,” by Cibo Matto

Shortly after I return from this trip, my sweetheart, Bruce, who I’ve just met, sends me Cibo Matto’s Pom Pom as a gift, after I confess to him that the artichoke is my totem produce. Thistled and prickly on the outside, but with a soft, creamy heart. I am trying to learn to be vulnerable in my life. I am trying to learn to be vulnerable in this book. Plucked petals, plucked feathers scattering the floor: “Are you gonna keep on peeling me?”

 “Iron Man” by The Bad Plus

I’m drawn to the hybridities and fluidities of Iron Man: the way in which he’s cyborg, how he’s both human and alien because of the way he can independently rocketship himself into outer space, that he’s a mollusk with a removable shell, not to mention his broken, glowing, vulnerable-making arc reactor of a heart. I’m drawn, too, to the hybridities and fluidities of jazz trio The Bad Plus’s cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Iron Man.” Opening with some random out-of-tune piano noodling that evolves into flight of the bumblebee-esque passage work, the original tune is then introduced, tongue in cheekishly, with all of its kitschy, lugubrious grandeur—pianist Ethan Iverson’s intricate keyboard filigree becoming increasingly elaborate, like a thousand fleet-winged bees attempting to launch an iron rocket. Toward the end of the song, the key brilliantly, and improbably shifts from minor to major, and through the playful and virtuosic keyboard work, darkness is transformed into the sublime. I love that! Maybe I was attempting to aspire to a little bit of that myself in Dandarians.

What happens when someone indelibly marks you, and you become invisibly inked, like the ultraviolet that tattoos the petals of certain flowers?

In the dark, you phosphoresce.

Honeybees read your mind like a neon sign.  They swarm, clatter, and hum about you like a cluster of lovesick grapes.

The song you’re usually so careful not to sing out loud now chorused in harmony¾a swelling of sound and polyphonic counterpoint, lyrics prismed into infinity as the graffiti scored onto your body is read through the multiple facets, the ommatidia, of curious, compound eyes.

And really, what will the crickets think of this insurgent, cross-species mating call, when their ears—tiny swollen drums in their knees—begin to throb in response?

Once, a man I thought I loved with all the awful rasp and moan of a Billie Holiday song, even though (or maybe even because) he belonged to another, pulled an apple from his book bag, offered it to me in his office behind a shut door.  Simple as tapping a chocolate orange to fracture it open.  Simple as peeling off the shiny rind of foil.

(Even though I prefer the flecked grit of pears—especially Japanese pears, that miscegenation of the apple.  Their round bottoms cushioned against bruising at the grocery store in white Styrofoam fishnets.  Spiral of freckled skin curling in even, green coils onto a quiet plate.)

Once, I left an apple out for the squirrels, and later, it reappeared on top of a nearby telephone pole—red, emphatic point punctuating an upside-down exclamation mark.

Word problem:  An entomologist accidentally spills an eyedropper’s splash of moth pheromone on his knee and he’s marked forever.  Wherever he goes, he’s trailed in a skirl of moths, skittering and flickering around his kneecap like a three-dimensional tattoo.  As in most cases of mistaken identity, he’s mildly embarrassed.  The moths, though, remain resolute.  In light of this given, is it better to be (a) the marked one trailed by a cloud of moths, or (b) one of the moths . . . so absolutely fixed in your certainty about who and what you wanted?