RogueAgent

WELCOME TO ROGUE AGENT’S SIXTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! A HEARTFELT THANKS TO OUR AUTHORS, ARTISTS, AND READERS WHO HAVE MADE IT POSSIBLe.

ISSUE 73
CONTENTS

APRIL 2021

Zizheng William Liu
Charlie Quayle
Kate Horowitz
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz
ART: Silas Plum
Willa Carroll
Kristin LaFollette
Sarah Degner Riveros
Lauren Bender
E. Kristin Anderson

CONTRIBUTORS

Zizheng William Liu

AN AUTOMATON TEACHES YOU HOW TO CODE ANOREXIA

first; to detect a charlatan, check pulse.
is it too fast? then it’s a fake.
body too fat? a fake.
check body temperature. is the skin a frigid north pole, breakable like a
stick? yes? then it passes the test.

second; calculate the binary between bmis.
binary because the curmudgeons who taught you algebra are incorrect— you should
know by now---
there is not an infinite amount of numbers,

only two: overflowing and beautifully slim.

ignore the optimists, the ones with the candy white teeth. in this pseudo-language,
derived from strings of
not hungry today and i already ate,
there are only two.

third; remind yourself that it’s your choice which of the two you want to be.

fourth; here is a computational problem for you.

  def function(beautiful):
            var weight = skinny

error: “skinny” is not defined
error: “weight” cannot be overwritten, it is already defined as “obese”

fifth; to educate an illiterate, show them the basics. if-statements.

  if you consume one cheeto,
    then you are an ingrate to your sacred body, then there is a bug in your code and
    then the only way to get rid of it is to stack and overflow.

if you, kleptomaniac you, sneak through your door and barefoot your way towards the hot
light in the kitchen,
then the variable lb overflows and you have to start the code over from scratch.

sixth; examine the source code. examine it closely. look at the variables, their
vertebrae, look at how deliciously visible it is, how it
pokes out. look at the tiny value of their constant, the
collarbones. they’re not the collarbones of a wannabe programmer. they’re
regal, jutting, magnificent.

seventh; it’s your choice.

eighth; here is another name for the class variable: pyromaniac. you can’t help it, can you?
starting fires? it’s a different kind of burning.
not houses, but thighs.
not a forest, but a wide expanse of stomach.

ninth; 
            ideal_list = [thighgap, flat_stomach, tiny_waist, sticks, no_flesh, ribs, collarbones, wrist, 
toned_stomach, spine]
            safe_list = [monsterzero, ricecake, grapes, proteinbar, cucumber, greentea, blueberries]

tenth; have you solved the computation problem yet?
            has var obese been overwritten yet?
                        has it? 

eleventh;
for i in range (< lb):
the clocks are ticking,
the calculators are running,
the numbers are being handed to you on a silver plate.
you eat them and
var hunger = negative.

twelfth; error: the fps has gotten
drudgingly,
exhaustingly
slow.
you delete a line but it comes right back.
backspace and
it comes right back.
delete backspace return enter keysmash
but it comes right back.

thirteenth;
            my_list = [hairloss, fragile_bones, dehydration, fainting, cold, infertility, heart_failure]

fourteenth;
try:
var eating disorder = gone;
            error

try:
remove var eating disorder;
            error

try:
please get me out of this

traceback (most recent call last):
file “anorexia”, line 12
syntax error: invalid syntax

try:
for i in range (infinity):
var eating disorder = forever
var weight = 0

break

Charlie Quayle

TEETH

i’ve been biting my nails
since before i could speak
fingers in my mouth
long before words

anxious since birth
i entered this world
ready to chew
my own body apart

i’ve always been a wolf
but i’m growing tired
of gnawing at
crescent moon nails

so i’ve started to paint them
with hard clear polish
but i cannot change
the howl caught in my throat

my nails are growing in
but now blood dries 
in the teeth marks
on my cracked lips

Kate Horowitz

UNTIL I AM READY TO BE ANGRY ALL MY ANGERS WILL BE IRRATIONAL

1.
moonlight is just reflected sunlight
which means a vampire is never
truly safe, not even at night

2.
the silver umbrella i carry is large and mortifying

3.
none of my clothes fit me

4.
the man on the sidewalk hollers
it isn’t raining

he is angry like i am insulting him personally
on purpose
by carrying an umbrella

5.
when i mention that my skin reacts
to sunlight somebody always says
vampire
sometimes somebody is me

to laugh at your own
disease is to show humility
did you hear the one about the goth girl who

6.
the reflective silver
umbrella i have to carry is heavy
and hurts my wrist

7.
every time i put on my knee braces
i rediscover what it means
to have legs
that work

the minute they’re are on i remember
that for most people walking is easy
that walking should not be hard

8.
the dermatologist rolled his eyes
you probably just like feeling special

9.
my knee braces were designed
by men to fit
under men’s clothing

they do not fit
under my clothing:
i do not wear them

10.
my clothes look like a teenager’s hand-me-
downs or gym clothes someone
threw away

11.
my stepmother rolled her eyes
she’s just doing it for attention

12.
it was anaphylaxis

13.
i can’t buy new clothes because nothing fits me
because i am bony and bulgy and too short in some places and too long in others and my hips
are not where or how a woman’s hips are supposed to be

women are not supposed to be bony-bulgy short-long
women are not supposed to be

14.
so i give up in Target and plunk down
$15 for a sloppy floral romper i will never wear
out of the house

15.
i am too tired,
too clumsy to learn
how to tailor my clothes

16.
i can’t even look at myself
in the mirror

17.
i never leave the house anyway

18.
i never leave the house
because slouching down the block in shabby
sweats i am still reduced
to a fuckable object

19.
just being friendly

20.
they snatch at my silver umbrella
it isn’t raining

21.
and now the moon is out and she understands
everything but i am too betrayed by her
cheap sun trick to go
and see her

and i am jealous
because even in her bone-bulge
she is perfect

and even bare-ass naked
she is untouchable

and even bathed
in sunlight she is safe

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

BINDING

an abundance of blood
crimson pulse against breast-fed newborn softness

love-reparation and instinctual lavish of motherhood
the binding ritual of mothers and mothers’ mothers

abuelita takes the cloth and winds it tightly around my hips with
stern insistence of strength she whispers ritual de la cuarentera as rigid
knuckles against my skin pray promise

mother takes up the slack and pulls the binding
taut winding upward toward my ribs 

cinched rigid the uterus pressed and held
by muscle against muscle
ligaments and organs
marrow and bone

Binding tightly
what must be bound

Silas Plum

THE ANATOMICAL BRAIN

HEADACHE

THE ANATOMICAL HEART

Artist statement:

"Headache" comes from a point of frustration with the limitations of the body. The inability to interact with a liminal space free from the constraints of flesh. In particular, the inequality present within the relationship of the mental to the physical. A headache can ruin a good mood more easily than a bad mood can ruin your body, at least in the short term. Part of the process of making physical art is the translation of something ephemeral into something practical. “The Anatomical Brain" and "The Anatomical Heart” are companion pieces. They stem from the passing and relatively unoriginal thought that we spend our entire lives with and are entirely dependent on these masses of muscle and nerves, but, with few exceptions, we never see or touch them. These paintings are talismanic. They stand in.

Willa Carroll

SCORE FOR BODY AS THIRST SUIT

Supply chain of dreams | wake me wet in the night | sucking the cold teat of fear | Lady Madonna wears a blue hazmat suit | Helicopters head to Queens | doctors suit up in garbage bag smocks | tigers cough in the Bronx | crowded towers fevering | In the potter’s field | unclaimed bodies laid three deep | we sing for thee | humid vowels fall from our mouths | swaddled to hold | down the count | Praise our grandmothers | born in the year of Spanish Flu | mine in shut down St. Louis | not in Philadelphia | open then for death’s business | For survival she credits her mother’s milk | thin rivers laced with mercury | in a young century

Kristin LaFollette

[PORTRAIT OF A] YOUNG WOMAN’S DOPPELGANGER]

It wasn’t sudden—
It’d be wrong to say it was

Over the course of four years,
I started to forget what
it was like before and

toward the end, I could
only avert my eyes when
I saw her, run of blood
and rise of bone just visible
beneath delicate skin

that made me think of
teeth puncturing fruit

I thought:
If the girl is a stranger,
I can’t mourn her.

And:
This can’t possibly be
the same person.

The girl I knew took French,
traveled to Ireland, stayed
in the sun so long that her
scalp burned and came
away in the shape of
cottonwood seeds.

The girl I knew plucked weeds
from the bed of the river, had
ulnas & tibias formed from well water,
was born out of an abundance of
mesh & thorn—

First she existed, all torch light
& citronella, then she became
the field where the floodplain
used to be—

Sarah Degner Riveros

RIVEN
There is a river whose streams make glad…
Psalm 46:4

I covet blue ink rather than
all these memories spilled on my skin.
I want mermaid hair to
cascade over forehead and nape
where a fist splashed fear over
my entire future;  a water
ribbon to snake the geography of
my earthly survival; rapids
to churn over a muscle
the size of my fist, pump
life through the middle of me.
What would they charge me?
to stream a trickle of ink over
shoulder blades, down my spine,
turquoise circling the hip with a full 
labral tear that hurts hot as sand.
A blue filament of truth on
my sleeve might slip down a wrist,
ring round a finger, disappear
under a nail I’d once bitten through
from the wrong end.  The quick grew back
when I got free. A waterfall
splits at my core, tumbles down
thighs, jumps knees and puddles
over scalded skin scarred by tea
above the arch of my left foot;
water pools in my shoes, the
wet slog of witness: this granite-
grandeur-spliced river of life.

Lauren Bender

HEADLONGING

I paint a face on a fucking egg and put it in my mouth to chew
on, calcium crushing calcium, sunk under gooey yolk, as if it's gum,

a thoughtless long-drawn hobby. I paint a face convinced that if
I paint a face, I will have mastered friendship, except: you're 

not a real friend, I accuse as I pop it past my lips. Face, overwhelmed
by my body's compulsive living. Friend, kissed away: where, you're

quiet now, come back out? But it's a trap where nothing you put in
can ever come out again, and I remember how I have to relearn this 

despair every year in different forms. Even my fake face is alone
with the moment it just now met imperfectly and lost. Example, that 

egg in my snake stomach, from solution to snack. If a swallow means
never being satisfied, we say swallow anyway, since we know there's

an end to all of this so why not? Enjoy. Quench. Drink up. Nobody
can blame you, wanting. I paint a person on a rock and put it to

my lips as a test. So nice and cold. It'd break my teeth. I can stop
short, but my tongue takes over, over and over: I'm here, yes, are you?

Golden shovel: “Chew gum if you’re overwhelmed. / You’re in this alone. That means there’s nobody to stop you.” – Max Ritvo

E. Kristin Anderson

BODY WARM

Maybe there were changes—
that name lost to a blurring screen,

arrow pointing
to a trap door. Unconscious,

I found God in panic, fell
a hundred feet into

a heavy full moon. I’m sure I came
closer to beautiful

in descending, and the south
carries me all night,

a pale concrete to stretch above
the other side. I need

to take the sound of laughter back,
to remember my own jaws.

This is an erasure poem. Source Material: Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. Mass Market ed. Ballantine, 2015. 256-270. Print.

Issue 73 Contributors

Based in Austin, TX, E. Kristin Anderson is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, 17 seventeen XVII, We’re Doing Witchcraft, and Behind, All You’ve Got. Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Porkbelly Press.

Lauren Bender lives in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared in IDK Magazine, The Collapsar, Gyroscope Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Yes Poetry, and others. You can find her on twitter @benderpoet.

Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus (The Word Works). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, Narrative, The Slowdown, Tin House, and elsewhere. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she was the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize. Her poetry video and multimedia work has been featured in Interim, Narrative Outloud, TriQuarterly, Writers Resist, and other venues. She earned her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in New York City. Find her on the internet at www.willacarroll.com.

Kate Horowitz is a poet, essayist, and science writer in Maine. Her poems have appeared in journals including Monstering, Doubleback Review, Moonchild Magazine, and Yes Poetry, and in anthologies of poems on pop culture, tarot cards, and inanimate objects. You can find her online at thingswrittendown.com and on Twitter @delight_monger. Kate likes moss and rain and dogs on the beach and long walks at night. She lives by the sea.

Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection Hematology (winner of the 2021 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize, selected by Missouri Poet Laureate Karen Craigo) and the chapbook Body Parts (winner of the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Contest). She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the Art Editor at Mud Season Review. You can visit her on Twitter at @k_lafollette03 or on her website at kristinlafollette.com.

Zizheng William Liu is a student from Houston, Texas. His work has previously been recognized by the International Human Rights Art Festival's Youth Anthology and by Eunoia Review. When he's not writing, he loves snapping the ever-changing world around him with his Canon Rebel camera.

At age 12, Silas Plum won the East Coast POG tournament. The prize was 500 POG’s, small collectible cardboard circles, each with an identical red and blue design on the front. From that moment on, he became obsessed with the question of Value. Why were these important? How could anything not necessary for survival be worth more than anything that was? Does artistic sentiment have value? The POG’s are gone, but the questions remain. Through assemblages of defunct currency, discarded photographs, and long-forgotten illustrations, Silas Plum challenges the idea of objective vs subjective value. He believes strongly in the tired old maxim that the true value of an object is more than the sum of its parts, that the gut is a truth-teller, and that the Aristotelian notion of learning-by-doing is the best teacher around. Judge his worth at silasplum.com.

Charlie Quayle is a native Vermonter, currently based in New York City. A nonbinary actor and poet, Charlie is most interested in writing about gender, the body, and unique self-expression. Charlie also finds inspiration in nature, drawing from a love of sailing and exploring the outdoors. When not acting, Charlie can be found journaling or playing the guitar.

Sarah Degner Riveros (she/her) teaches Spanish and studies Creative Writing at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she is currently working on an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work is forthcoming in Vassar Review, Clarion, and Pithead Chapel, and has appeared recently in Sonora Review, Grey Sparrow, Barnstorm Journal, Yes, Poetry, Willawaw, Bearings, Porridge, Murphy Square Quarterly, and Azahares.

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.