Notes on Dissociation
The summer comes unbuttoned and your mind slips free of its body to float up and nudge the corner of the ceiling like a Mylar balloon: happy birthday! happy birthday! happy birthday!
Sulky with poison rain, you’re a swollen cloud casting shadows over the plains. What would happen if you were to pour yourself out onto that ground, until everything darkened, until everything was all shadow?
Your body dreams of invisibility: like January black-out fog muffling the headlamps of your car on I-29 as the river exhales its thick clouds of icy breath.
Your body dreams of camouflage: an effervescent fizz into gray television static.
The summer comes unbuttoned. The pandemic surges and wanes. Children killed in mass shootings. Unarmed Black bodies martyred by the gunfire of police officers in state-sanctioned lynchings during routine traffic stops. The bodies of Asian women murdered. The bodies of Asian elders assaulted in the streets.
Your Japanese mother, on lockdown in Memory Care nine hours away, tells you she hates you before hanging up the phone.
(It doesn’t particularly matter which summer’s the summer that comes unbuttoned because isn’t this any summer, anymore?)
Dissociate: as in a social severing. A breakup, a friendship’s end, a professional splitting of ties. How your parents sever you off like a gangrenous limb, even though you’re their only family. How they refuse to speak to you until they need your help. And because you’re the only one left, you must return to parent the parents who were not good parents to you.
(With your feet on the air / and your head on the ground / Try this trick and spin it, yeah / Your head will collapse / If there’s nothing in it / And you’ll ask yourself / Where is my mind?)
The first time the summer comes unbuttoned you’re molested by the boy who lives across the street. He says he’s doing what he’s doing to you because you’re half Japanese. Your parents say it’s your fault he does what he does to you because you don’t make him show you the gun he points at you from inside his windbreaker. How the boy isn’t really a boy. He is 18. You are 8.
You think about the very word, trigger: how it brings to mind bullets, how it brings to mind the permeability of bodies, both physically and psychologically.
You think the unbuttoning has something to do with the nonconsensuality of it all. Of the rapey-ness of the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Of the rapey-ness of the shooters. Of the rapey-ness of the rapists.
When that panicked feeling of being trapped inside some meat-sack of disaster comes, why wouldn’t you want to be somewhere / anywhere else?
Dissociation: for you, the flight of fight or flight. Nowhere for the body to go to feel safe. Hatchet out an escape hatch, quietly slip out of the lid. Like Elizabeth Bishop’s Man-Moth, who “thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection.”
(With your feet on the air / and your head on the ground / Try this trick and spin it, yeah / Your head will collapse / If there’s nothing in it / And you’ll ask yourself / Where is my mind?)
The summer comes unbuttoned and you blow your own mind like a shotgun blast of breath to the head of a dandelion gone to seed. Each seed a tiny parachute spoked with delicate filaments arranged to create a detached vortex when the seed’s borne aloft into air. The vortices ferrying the seeds up to half a mile away from the parent plant.
Your body dreams of dispersal: an accident involving teleportation, and now you’re a ghost in the machine.
Your body dreams of evaporation: like the spider suspended in medias res, desiccating in the cloudy film of lint behind the dryer.
You think of the sea slug, the Sarcoglossan, also known as the leaf sheep, or the green thief, because it steals chloroplasts from algae and can perform photosynthesis in a daring bank robber-esque move known as kleptoplasty.
You think of how, during extreme duress, certain species of Sarcoglossan can detach their own heads, leave their bodies behind.
(As decoy? As sacrifice? Like dumping out the non-essentials when rutted in mud on the Oregon Trail?)
The decapitated body can live without its head for days, sometimes even months.
If the green thief’s young and healthy, the open wound on the back of its head heals, despite its severing intentions, and within days, the head begins to regenerate a new body: a new beating heart, new vital organs. After three weeks, a near-perfect replica of its original body.
But what to do with a discarded body that’s absent a head?
(Perhaps you will disguise the headlessness with a mask, the way the Pokemon Cubone wears its dead mother’s skull like a fetish for grief.)
The summer comes unbuttoned and your mind blossoms away from your body like a pyrocumulonimbus cloud fueled by wildfires in the American West: fire-breathing, toxic, explosive.
Your body is having nightmares: spiraling fire whirls, flash points, trees crowned in flame.
Your body dreads scorched earth.
But only in scorched earth can you begin to dream again of ephemerals, weeds, the slow march back of wood-boring beetles. Of grasses and scrub. Of birds and armadillos come in search of the beetles. Of raccoons and foxes to curl into hollowed-out wood. Of scrubby canopy to lay down needles and leaves for mulch. Of taller and taller trees. Of vines. Of being nudged by the rough tongues of deer. Of being drenched by a cold hard rain.
Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fifth volume of poetry, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review. Her favorite sweet is matcha ice cream, and recent work can be found online at Diode and Versedaily.
