Roripaugh - Dandarians: poems

Also by Lee Ann Roripaugh

On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year

Year of the Snake

Beyond Heart Mountain

2014, Text by Lee Ann Roripaugh

Cover art Kimiko Yoshida, The Astronaut Bride. Self-portrait, 2002.

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Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover photo by Kimiko Yoshida

Author photo by Cathy Flum

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First Edition

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Roripaugh, Lee Ann.

[Poems. Selections]

Dandarians : poems / Lee Ann Roripaugh.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-57131-896-1 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3568.O717A6 2014

811.54--dc23

2014004212

Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Dandarians was printed on acid-free 30% postconsumer-waste paper by Versa Press.

For Emily Haddad, Cathy Flum, Susan Wolfe, Pen Pearson, Caroline Hong, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, among others, with much love and gratitude. You are my missing sisters and best friends forever.

For Kundiman, my beautiful poetry tribe.

For my wonderful colleagues and students at the University of South Dakota and at the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing.

For all of the mentors, editors, journals, presses, and reading venues that have supported my work over the years with such kindness and generosityincluding a special thanks to Milkweed Editions and Allison Wigen for believing in Dandarians.

And, with love always, for Bruce, my sweet giant, my beautiful tsunami.

I would also like to thank the South Dakota Arts Council, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the University of South Dakota for the gifts of funding, time, space, and support without which this book would not be possible.

CONTENTS

Prismed through the scrim of my mothers Japanese accent, I think dandelions are Dandarians. Dan-dare-ee-uns. Futuristic, alienlike something named after late-night B-movie space creatures from an undiscovered planet.

Maybe this is why the disturbingly lurid fronds seem too yellow to me. They seethe, I believe, with a feverishly incandescent radioactivity. Im convinced this explains the obsessive, anxiety-laced fervor with which my parents uproot them from our lawn. As if under threat of colonization.

(Years later, reading Ray Bradburys Dandelion Wine, Im shocked at the thought of imbibing dandelions as alcoholic libation. I always secretly assumed dandelions were poisonous. Im convinced it must be a hoax. I begin to distrust the boundaries between Bradburys literary fiction and his science fiction.)

Because Im the only one in my kindergarten class who can read and write, theres shock and fallout when my confusion over Dandarians and dandelions is discovered. I receive special coaching. Slowly and loudly, as if I have suddenly become impaired: You say dandy. Then say lion.

At home, because it seems important, I pass this secret knowledge on to my mother: You have to say dandy, I tell her. Then say lion.

Her slap flares a stung handprint on my cheek like alien handprints in the TV show Roswell. Im the mother, she says. You the daughter. As if that explains everything. As if in another year or so I wont make phone calls on her behalf, pretending to be my own mother so she wont have to struggle to make herself understood to hairdressers, pharmacists, the PTA. Can they really not understand her? Or do they simply willfully refuse to comprehend?

I am five. I understand Ive hurt my mothers feelings without meaning to. I understand Dandarians are toxically radioactive. Just not in the ways Id originally thought.

And so when I tell you Im an aliena Dandarian, hailing from the planet DandarI am, of course, mostly joking. But not entirely. When I tell you Im radioactive, its mostly a posture. But not entirely.

On Dandar, we are partial to the theme song from Hawaii Five-O. We like the color yellow. All the best dresses chosen by mothers for daughters come in the color yellow. We eat osembei and sometimes mochi after school with hot green tea, speak our very own pidgin English at the kitchen table when my fathers at the office. My father doesnt approvemaybe because our pidgins sometimes laced with the best new swear words Ive learned at school. We never, ever answer the phone without proper deployment of the Secret Code.

Heres my universal translation device. Although when fog threads the streets like a rough, shaggy yarn too unruly to slip through the eye of a sewing needle, the reception becomes white static and everything garbles to Babel.

Half-life.

Decay.

This is my ray gun.

Do you know the Secret Code?

Spasmed jerk and gutter of Hiroshima newsreels unwinding inside a movie set in Hiroshima, where the actress in the movie plays an actress making a movie about Hiroshima and peace. A movie about (re)membering the (dis)membered. A movie about the horror of forgetfulness.

It is here, inside this movie, where I will walk tonight, along black-and-white streets of borrowed time, framed within the movie set of a movie set; where brazen neon flickers numinous promises, fictional lovers first illuminated, then dowsed, like a candle pinched between thumb and forefinger. Can you see me? Will you follow?

Youre destroying me / Youre good for me.

Late-night caf. Crisp pale beer. Shadows of moths small black hearts charred by the sudden flash and immolation of rice-paper lanterns. Insatiable koi mouthing the surface of the gardens pond: like an agitation of insects against a lit window; like your face, illuminated by the quiet electric glow of your computer screen as you read; like my face, lit by my words as I write them to you.