RogueAgent

ISSUE 72
CONTENTS

MARCH 2021

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz
Cassandra Griffing
Katie Darby Mullins
Melissa Fite Johnson
Alix Perry
INTERVIEW: Jessica Abughattas
Paula Ethans
Justin Vicari
Koss
Sara Luisa Kirk
Andrew Kozma

CONTRIBUTORS

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

MY BODY AT THE TABLE

I walk under the stream of hot water, a smudging of skin.
The bloom blooms hot across my chest, I bite down on the sweet taste of fire.
Palms clutch in pleading supplication.

The stream leaves crimson streaks down my stomach, silken sashes ribboning
down my legs, soothing across the scars on my knees; ancient burial grounds
of unanswered prayers.

I lay across the floor; limbs limp and splayed; tender skin a soft linen.
A blossom red rose arches from the center of my body.

Each lover at the tips of my fingers — I breathe, breasts rise toward God.
I rest in the charity of my sin; shallow breaths of ache; relief from the pain. 

Pink pills in a cup, sweet contrition, sweet contrition.

My lovers, they reach, each takes from the flesh.
My body at the table.

Cassandra Griffing

FILES => BODY => COMPLIMENTS & COMPLAINTS

How are your wrists so skinny?
Fun size
You’re fat
You have my dream body
Can we talk about how hairy her arms are?!
You look a little thin
GIRL YOU GOTTA EAT SOME POTATOES
Those leg muscles!!
A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10
Little girl
You’re pretty, hags
20?! You look 12!
You’re so fit I hate it
I’d tap that
Oh she has a birth mark
You look good today ;)
Your boobs are like grapes
There’s nothing there
What a babe!
You need to put some meat on those bones!
Beautiful
You look so tired
You’re so itty bitty and I love it!
Why are you so short? That’s ugly

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Katie Darby Mullins

DR. PHIL AND I PRETEND TO BE PUNKS

It didn’t take long for my tattoos

To accumulate: the makeup

To extend out past my eyelid

Further, further. Gold. Glitter. Dirty

Hair, bitten nails. A jacket I sewed

A picture of ‘70s Bowie on the back

Using a hand crippled by neuropathy



Halfway between not holding the needle

At all and piercing through to bone.

I always liked my music with teeth

And once I realized this body was

A loaner, I decked it out like a teenager’s

Car, bumper stickers and flashy dice

Even as I knew the transmission wore

And the engine block wasn’t steady. 



My shoulder is dislocated again,
 Phil.
It came out, fell
 in front of a student after I’d jammed
I
t back in as hard as I could. We’ve done

The shoulder. You know. And you know

I wear a set of figure-8 rings— my iron

Knuckles— so my fingers don’t dislocate

And break. But I’ll be damned
If I don’t wear silver boots or glittered

Shoes and pretend it’s an aesthetic,
A do-it-yourself rag doll, body dressed

Half in braces and prosthetics,
Half in neon rock shirts. And I want

That: the contrast distracts me

From the tint in my glasses,
The sag in my eye.
But when I saw you



Dressed in those fake tattoos, black 
Eyeliner raccooned and lined to your cheeks,
It made me wonder if we all had designs

Drawn somewhere inside our skin, hidden

Maybe from even our own view, waiting

To poke through, crooked X’s,

To rise up and scar, leaving color—
Too much color— and strange beauty

Only to the beholder. And yeah,

Yours was a joke. Sometimes I wonder

If I’m joking, too: choosing random things

That make me happy, no rhyme, no reason

Not on my face or in my brain or—

But it doesn’t really matter. I sew,

 I play guitar.
I got good at drawing more eyeliner
On one eye to make it look more open. 

I put glitter on everything. And when

There’s no glitter left, when I can’t

Bend to tie those shoes with my busted shoulder|

And my fingers, already crooked—
I wear the slip-ons,
the ones with Johnny Ramone

On them. The ones that say
 “HEY HO LET’S GO” on the back. 

The ones that make me feel like I’m choosing

To look like this. Like it could be a joke
And you and I could just go to wardrobe,
Wash all this away, forget the memories
Etched into our core like permanent ink.

Melissa Fite Johnson

IT’S NOT MY MOTHER’S FAULT

she cast insecurities
onto me, her only copy—

brightly, You and I both
need to lose 20 pounds.

Too tall, both of us;
women should be folded

wings. Never go bowling
and admit your shoe size.

When did I stop slipping
from the bathroom

before the steam cleared?
When did I first feel glad  

to see myself, a Polaroid
born from shower mist?

Now I tuck my hair behind
my ear, gently, finally gently.

I hold my mother’s hands
so she can’t shield her belly

with her crossed arms, an action
a little like giving herself a hug. 

Alix Perry

GUM WOUNDS

The prickle on my shins tells me the sun is setting
as sky dulls behind webbed branches.

Slipping into ink— is it the pen or the night in which I am captured?
From the outside, I’m guessing it looks the same.

Three years ago I read aloud a poem populated by
severed body parts. The setting: our apartment.

Today, I hold diamonds in my mouth
and wait for him to come searching.

As long as I don’t talk, their edges won’t cut.
There is no obedience as radiant as silence.

My body wheels on a continual swivel,
awaiting that familiar unsettling of his return.

Twist right. There’s blood in a lover’s kiss.
And everything he could say to me now.

Twist left. There’s blood in the lover’s kiss.
My nostalgia drops by our apartment.

Twist right. There’s blood in my lover’s kiss.
Delivering comfort like sunset’s lasting song.

Before it all, this was nothing but woeful theory,
voyeuristic intrigue. The tragedy that could  

happen to me, but never would. Never, I learned,
is a strange word for an unknowable future.

Tomorrow, as I again barricade into twilight’s fade,
a fly enters through the closed window.

I inhale, and it lands in my lungs.
Like it thinks I can’t swat it there.

It doesn't know that these days I am more than
an author of temporary death.

It doesn’t know the language of
this unruly body.

My gums accept their wounds with these words.
I gulp down every bloody breath.

Jessica Abughattas talks about embodiment
and writing Strip

Please describe your journey toward writing poetry that reflects on the experience of living in the body. Have you always written this way, or did you come to it over time?

I kind of think I have always written this way. I'm drawn to images that evoke multiple senses. Poems that use the body to navigate emotions are felt in the body. That's what I want.

As an epigraph for the book, you have Emily Dickenson saying, “Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy...” In the last lines of the poem “What I Want,” the speaker tells us, “My taste is fickle as a tongue / partial to all it encounters, / refusing to choose.” Is this ecstasy? How does the culture around Los Angeles preclude or promote ecstasy for your protagonist?

Real, lived pleasure is so rare in general. To experience it requires that I'm out of autopilot. In awareness you can have an experience of the sublime. I want to at least try. Los Angeles has a built-in sadness and loneliness about it that I love — the freeways, the sprawl, everyone alone in their cars. And it feeds a pervasive sense of disconnection and boredom and impatience that makes a person seek out a container for surrender. And then you like feeling that way. It's an addictive pattern.

The poem that most piques my curiosity in this collection is “Litany for My Father,” with its truncations and interruptions as a counterpart to the layers of repetition. How and/or why did you choose this form to suit your subject matter? Please walk us through the process of writing this poem.

This poem began with both lines that completed a thought, and lines that started out truncated. It lived for a long time that way, with both. The poem survived many revisions, with and without interruptions, and I altered the way it appeared on the page quite a lot. I regard the interruptions as an act of care toward the father. The repetitions parallel the obsessions named in the poem.

LITANY FOR MY FATHER

Because curfews of
Because strip search at the checkpoint into
Because grandmother’s undergarments splayed on
Because two men with guns on the way to
Because grandmother saves plastic Coke liters to
Because the water could without notice be
Because my father learned to drive a tractor at age
Because four families live in one stone    
Because quartz bricks from my grandfather’s
Because after grandfather is buried, dad
Because dad didn’t cry, he buried his face in his hands &
Because the cancer couldn’t be
Because home is too far for the scent of
Because rosary beads hang from
Because my grandfather made a living carving crosses out of
Because my hands ache to make something of
Because my hands are raw from grasping my grandmother’s
Because I pried the lid off with my
Because checking the oven 14 times every
Because sorry dad I’m sorry I
Because penance is for
& upturned shoes means you’re stepping on God

Please share with our readers a list of 5-10 books and/or artists you think we should read right now.

The Twenty Ninth Year by Hala Alyan

Love is an Ex Country by Randa Jarrar

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky

Love and Other Poems by Alex Dimitrov

Some Rogue Agent fans are just beginning to explore what making art about the body would look like for them. What advice would you give to someone just starting down the path?

My advice would be to cultivate a practice of noticing feelings in the body. Those emotional artifacts in the form of tingles, pangs—are they in your feet? your chest? Mind-body practices are good for this. Make images out of the locations of those feelings. The hands, mouth, and throat come up often for me. This is where poetry has an enormous capacity to be healing, just through noticing and naming what you feel.

Paula Ethans

I KEEP MAKING COFFINS OUT OF MEN

I keep making coffins
out of men.

Close my eyes
halfway.
Lay atop the coarse fuzz
that leaves
almost-rug burn.
Turn apathetic to breath.

The funeral is for the forgetters
not the forgotten.
So he feasts on me
but swears he’ll leave
the good parts.
Just a bit, he pleads. But
he feels my neck
with both hands, wraps his
masculinity
around me until
he wants.

I keep finding coffins
in men.

And I can’t decide
if that says more about
the coffins
or the men.

The invitation
I admit
is tempting.

Tickle me
with your brush
Mr. Coroner
make me blush.

Men keeping making a coffin
out of me.

I try to tell my mom
when she sees me wearing
my favourite dress;
an expressionless face;
that night’s stench; and
a wood heavy enough to mask
the howls of the hollowness.

She whispers
we love you.

I would choke on her words
if I had the air.

Justin Vicari

THE ANGORA SWEATER

For her fourteenth birthday,
my parents gave it to her.

            Feathery, ash charcoal,
            five pearl buttons.

I wanted to hold it up to my body,
where her rosebuds would go,
while mine would go nowhere.
My childhood, marked
by my father’s rage whenever
I tried to kiss his stubbled cheek.

            I can feel it I can feel it how good it feels

He always let her have the hidden nickel from his palm,
no matter which fist her small fingers tapped,

            right or left hand?

Then came puberty

            when my rosebuds sprouted
            when I softened and swelled
            when estrogen surged in me
            and my genitals did not work

Neither boy nor girl. If I
had gotten the angora sweater,
I might have learned to honor
my softness.
But I was not meant to be clean,
and there is not one reason on earth why I at
that age would have been given
angora anything.

Koss

SHOULDER STORY

the mocked shoulder
different from the other shoulders
holder of shame, this soldiering shoulder
blame-the-victim-shoulder
you-brought-this-on-yourself-shoulder
your-head-is-a-bowling-ball-shoulder
your-shoulder’s-a-boat-shoulder
your-ass-matches-shoulder
touch-your-right-knee-shoulder
baggy-shirt-shoulder
a-body-tells-its-story-shoulder
heart cover, sloucher, defective shoulder
breast plate, horror armor, bug deflector
a shoulder no mother could love
shoulder full of electric shock
lightning-strikes-bridge-shoulder
tearing across traps and triceps
shoulder at war with neck
shoulder abandoning arm
pins-in-fingers-shoulder
give-me-some-drugs-shoulder

deformed shoulder meet Psoas, rubber labile
bitch band snapper of body halves, of mismatched limbs,
she calls you as she packs her suitcase
where does she think she’s going
with that odd body?

let the world
shame you for being different, you know
what you’re doing as you draw
a spiral so slowly across a life / a body
shoulder get older and furl into yourself

the universe arranges in spirals, so curl
up and return to your source while
your limbs quietly coil
your dear ammonite ears hear
your beginning sounds
from before everything went wrong

they say it happened in birth
you were dying before you arrived

Sara Luisa Kirk

TETHER

Bereft of all but the sun
I map out any alternative

route to evening as if it
weren’t a sinking ship

as if the living
thick with panic

weren’t trapped.

Still the body sits
because it asked to 

not mine
but to whom I’d like

to belong—
that delusion

the one that means
releasing

the last remaining tether.

No thought of action
just urge blooming

into motion
the birds I call mine.

What are birds for?

Of course, of course.
They’re not for anything.

Andrew Kozma

SONG OF THE INSENSIBLE

The world is an oyster, and I’m the grit.
These are the boots my brother died in.

This city is a tongue, and I’m the bad taste.
I’m the cicada inside the jaundiced pre-storm light.

Hello? You sent this to the wrong address. My brother
is still alive. Still dead. Was brought back

with a lazarus shot and a slap to the face.
I am the leaf litter, the headless roach.

I can walk between raindrops. I can be insensible.
When visibility’s poor, I am the blur on the horizon.

If my brother’s dead, I am not alive.
If I’m alive, my brother can’t be dead.

No one owns the boots. The boots own no one.

Issue 72 Contributors

Jessica Abughattas’s debut collection, Strip, won the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. She is a Kundiman fellow and a graduate of the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing. Born and raised in California by Palestinian immigrants, she now lives on Tongva land in Los Angeles. 

Paula Ethans is a writer, poet, organizer, and human rights lawyer from Canada. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Ethel Zine, The Quarantine Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, nymphs publications, WordsFest Zine, Bareknuckle Poet, and more. She most recently won the 2019 Trans Europe Expression Slam finals in Manchester, UK. You can follow her on Twitter @PaulaEthans.

Cassandra Griffing recently graduated from Kansas State University in December 2020. There, she was an undergraduate in English Creative Writing and minored in Anthropology. She has previously been published in Elementia, and Green Blotter.

Melissa Fite Johnson is a high school English teacher who lives with her husband and dogs in Lawrence, KS. She is the author of Green (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, SWWIM, Sidereal, Stirring, Whale Road Review, Broadsided Press, and elsewhere. Find her online at melissafitejohnson.com.

Sara Luisa Kirk is a poet, teacher, and the author of only all the blood (Grey Book Press). Her work is featured or forthcoming in SWWIM, Anak Sastra, Hobart, and wildness. Sara lives and teaches in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she co-curates Magic Theatre, a monthly poetry series. Find her at saralkirk.com.

Koss is a queer writer and artist with an MFA from SAIC. They have work published (or forthcoming) in Best Small Fictions 2020, Diode Poetry, Chiron Review, Spoon River Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Rough Beast, and others. Her hybrid book, One for Sorrow, is due out in late 2020/early 2021 by Negative Capability Press. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular. Their website is http://koss-works.com.

Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Believer, Redactions, and Bennington Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award. Keep up with him on Twitter at @thedrellum.

Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. She’s been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC. Her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020.

Alix Perry is a white queer and trans writer living on occupied Coast Salish land (Greater Seattle). Their work has been published in Papeachu Review, the Courage is a Gift anthology, An Injustice!, and elsewhere. Their pen-named alter ego writes fiction for Scribd. More at alixperrywriting.com and on Instagram @enchantedkeloid.

Justin Vicari is a poet, a film and literature theorist, and a translator, almost completely self-taught, although they attended classes at the University of Pittsburgh. They are the author of eight books, including two full collections of poems, In Search of Lost Joy (Main Street Rag, 2018) and The Professional Weepers (Pavement Saw, 2011). Currently they are writing poetry about being intersex and about having Asperger's. Vicari's work appears in Rattle and other journals.

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz is new to submitting her poetry after many years of writing. She is currently working on a collection of work that explores the repressive denigration of racial, sexual and personal value in patriarchal religion and society. Based on her own perceptions, her poetry utilizes the metaphors of traditional Catholicism and caste-level colonialism, to break free from painful traditions and to reveal hidden oppression. She also participates with and organizes readings promoting mental health awareness. She writes poetry to maintain mental health wellness and draws from personal  experiences as well as through her experiences having grown up with a brother and father with multiple diagnoses. Jen is co-founder of Welcome: A Poetry Declaration, a platform for refugee and immigrant voices in partnership with San Antonio, TX. Immigration Liaison’s Office.  Her poetry is published or forthcoming in The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, Cutthroat: Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century,  I Sing: The Body, and Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal.