RogueAgent

ISSUE 76
CONTENTS

JULY 2021

Kathleen Mitchell-Askar
Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Auzin
Rubin Hardin
Lindsay Young
INTERVIEW: Teow Lim Goh
Leah Claire Kaminski
Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Jay Kophy
Cam Dyer-Hawes
Sara Quinn Rivara

CONTRIBUTORS

Kathleen Mitchell-Askar

FIGURINE

In the earliest representations
the body is a brute rectangle
starved of a face.
Two small protrusions for breasts,
magic manifest as a sixth toe,
and a little pressure exerted
on the edge of a dull blade
yielded in the wet clay
the narrow inlet
by which man has always entered
the scene. But most prominent
is the dark gape at the torso’s center,
the hunger that roots
for nothing but a mouth
to pronounce itself
ulteriorly. 

I bear the brunt of this hunger,
milk-flat,
wilted nipples,
whorls of pearlescent rivulets
where skin bulged and stretched
to accommodate
my children’s first exits.

The plank of my body,
what trap door
or ragged rim do I cover,
where with a false step
bodies fall out of and into
such featureless dark?

Leslie Contreras Schwartz

NIGHT ROOST

The body talks to herself in dead-of-night, grooms
carefully like a cat, licking the furry and blue-tinged spirit
into agreement:

Tomorrow you will not walk.

You will lose walking and lifting.
You will wake up choking.

The old one, laid out on the bed like a slash in the sweaty sheets
puts her gaunt face in the hands of the girl:

the one secreted inside with a handful of soft fat
and collagen plump, gardenia lipped days.

She plucks the old eyes, black
grapes, eats skein then pulp.

You have to fold body parts to get to the purpling
-inside skin, into the slick baby face. Behind her thighs are feet,
then legs, pickled in formaldehyde.

I love you so
and so, she tells the other,
the elder running
from her lips.

Together they eat their own origami heartbeats.

Together they edge and crease, googol-fold.

Pressed, creased, made one with a hard-line turn:

body the tool, the pattern-maker, reaching inside
this many-inhabited place of herself and herself,
multiplied to a million ones.

Handsome now slipped inside
one another. Neatly folded,
and swallowed whole.

Fully formed, now down they go
through impassable
vines,

using body as rope
into subterrane—

Here they hang
upside down,
bat wings curled
around one
another.

Night dosing, the roost
steams the cave,

their guano a precious
snow flurry.

Mother claw, gripping. 

The wrestle against
bone’s barbed wire.

Holding off its slice
of the spirit.

This rough twisting
of feeble
into prism.

Yes, the vitality—

the watertight
selfhood
resistant to crush.

All this: to get through a day
in the mind with an unwell body.

Auzin

NEW ANIMAL

If you want a new animal,
You know where to birth one.
You can have back the bond
I’ll cut out my navel and mail you the bloody stump since
I know childhood mementos mean so much to you.
Here, it’s the last vestige of our connection, take it!
You can pretend it belongs to that other girl, the one you wanted.
I know she is out there somewhere smiling
            (with long hair and short fingernails
            tasteful jewelry and no tattoos)
I could go on about what she looks like or sounds like but the point is,
You can take me back to the shelter now
            (your perfect home will return to splendor)
Pick up something soft and fluffy, someone easy to hold close
And if I am difficult to love, it is because you told me that I am.
There are reasons for all of my frailties and foibles
There are so many selves under this skin
Creatures inside me that I have created
If the truth scares you, it scares me too: 
I am the kind of beast which leaves claw-marks on this world.

Rubin Hardin

THIS PROPHET HAS FIBROMYALGIA

A man who thinks he is G*d
walks onto the bus.
His breath reeks of

cigarette smoke and doubt.
He approaches me,
spits out harshly 
that I’m too young to use a cane.
As if telling me would
result in a miracle. 

The day I picked my cane
at the pharmacy the angels
celebrated so vibrantly
that shooting stars
sprinted across the sky.

I sat down on the freezing
metal bench and was
in awe that I could
keep my torso up. 

The man who believes
he is G*d has never
been forced to rip open
a package with his teeth.

He’s never had to beg
his science teacher every day
for weeks to please follow

his IEP in the nicest tone
his autistic voice can muster.

The man who believes he is G*d
can take any job he is offered.
He will never be fired
for his inability to recognize
the social cues of customers.

The man who believes
he is G*d thinks he can spot
who is faking from an ocean away.

All mobility devices
are useless in his realm.
He could make a world filled

with ramps, if he wanted.  
He could make a temple
with canes resting on every pew.

He could make Torahs light
enough that anyone could lift them.

When we talk about choice,
this is never what is mentioned.

Only of the disabled people
who have the audacity
to exist on a public bus. 

Who sit on the accessible
seats without a mobility device.

When the bus driver asks
them to move seats because
they aren’t “really” disabled,
they dig their heels in.

They clutch their mermaid shaped
squeeze ball so tight the filling
explodes onto the bus floor.

This is the only time in their life
that they will refuse to clean
an overwhelming mess.

The second I say that I am disabled
a gaggle of self-identified G*ds
crash down from the sky. 

All handing out pamphlets
filled with useless opinions.
Swallowing keys to doors
I couldn’t have opened anyway.

Lindsay Young

UNTETHERED

I tripped acid for the first time two weeks after my mother was buried 
Spent a full day in bed as just
A body

A skin bag of veins
And heart        And veins        And skin          And question

Forgot how to shower naked. Got hot under all that water
And almost drowned
Held help just to use the bathroom. Doubled over 
For comfort
Sick at the thought of food, but too afraid to vomit

I remember my mother. The shame shaped around
How her body betrayed her. How she was forced
To spend a full day inside it, the only thing between it
And the floor, being my arms. How that day replaced itself
For an entire year. How she managed to stay more alive
Than her own flesh 

There’s a moment when I realize 
A body is
Just a body

The walls breathe in agreement that I am barely here
Only tethered by this pulsing skin of mine. So fresh
And so fragile, I can cut it open right now and leave it
Exactly where I stand
Sometimes I want to
All the time I can’t 

There’s a moment when I realize
My mother is not dead
She’s just left her body
Outgrown it. Grown so big her skin burst
Into doorway. Made room for her to pass
To a lighter place. A place not so disgusting
Not so always dying, not so dependent
On a weaker thing keeping her
Alive. My mother  

Lays on my chest in this dark room
Slows my heartbeat to hospital beep
And for a moment, I can touch her again

Bodies no longer in the way 

Just me,
My mother

Singing so steady
I don’t need to be
Here anymore

Teow Lim Goh talks about embodiment
and writing Faraway Places

The epigraphs to this book are so powerful. When I read them, they truly influenced my interpreting Faraway Places as a collection not just about places, but one that explores the intertwined nature of bodies, especially the female body, with the bodies of flora, fauna, earth, and water. What motivated you to write such a collection?

I’m glad you saw the conversations between the epigraphs and the poems.

I think of Faraway Places as an accidental book, in the sense that many of these poems started as “found” text from my drawer of discarded drafts. Several years ago, after I turned in the final manuscript for my first book, I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do next. Looking back now, I see that I was also burned out and I needed to refill the creative well. 

In this limbo, I went back to old drafts of essays and poems. I saw that while there were good reasons why I had put them aside, there was also a primal energy in the writing. I captured the lines and images that stood out and started working them into new poems.

I felt I was onto something, but I didn’t know what it was. I worked by instinct. I found that if I thought too much about what I was trying to do, the poems would not come. At some point, I felt I had exhausted this vein of writing and decided to see if I could put them together as a book.

I printed out the poems and started shuffling them around on the floor. It took a few weeks, but I saw there was an implicit story that I was trying to tell. Many of the discarded drafts that became the source texts of this book were from my travels in the American West in my twenties, trying to figure out who I was and what kind of writer and person I wanted to be.

The essays I had published from these travels wove history, nature, and experience to discuss larger subjects such as immigration and art. And in these travels, I developed the poetry project that has kept me busy for much of the last decade, which is to recover the histories of Chinese immigrants in the Old West.

When I finally put Faraway Places together, I saw I had been writing a shadow text. I saw that in my travels, I was not just contending with the “big” questions of history and identity, but I was also learning how to inhabit my body after trauma and dissociation. Many of the source texts were nature descriptions that editors had cut. They were excessive for the original essays, but I see now it was in trying to name and describe the natural world around me that I taught myself to trust what I could plainly see and experience.

In “January,” it says “bearing witness is the deepest form of love” (34). This collection bears witness to all kinds of places, from rainforest to mountains to desert to ocean. Did the traveling to witness such places come before the poems, or did you already have some of the poems, which motivated you to travel and write the rest of the collection?

“January” was one of the last poems I wrote for this collection, though I did not know it then. I had been thinking about the line “bearing witness is the deepest form of love,” which I found in an old draft, when I went for a walk around the lake near my home. It was in January, of course, and on a sunny day after a deep freeze. And it was an urban park, with a major road next to it, but given that this is Denver, there were also gorgeous views of the Rockies.

I did not set out thinking that I would write a poem. But I started composing lines in my head and typed them into my phone. And I saw that while this place was not the wild nature that we often exalt, I was bearing witness to the stasis and change that was winter. I was bearing witness to how our lives were all connected. I still had to work on making the phrases I had recorded into a poem, but the seeds of it came unexpectedly on that walk.

I find witness to be more of a mode of being and thought than action. We can teach ourselves to pay attention and find the precise language to testify to what we can see for ourselves. It is a practice that we internalize and bring to bear in our everyday lives. And in observing nature, I also learned to bear witness to injustice, whether in private interpersonal dynamics or on a sociopolitical level like in my work on the Chinese in the Old West.

All of that to say, there was a push and pull between travel, memory, and writing. I rarely travel with the intent to bear witness, but when I’m thinking about something, like a line from one of my old drafts, it colors much of how I perceive the world as I go about my life.

JANUARY

Geese gather on the lake, on the border
of water and ice. I walk on the shore,
watch the birds waddle and lift their wings
as if they wanted to fly. They swim
in a blue like the blue of the sky, feeding
on grasses, maybe a minnow. The sun
casts its last rays on the mountains beyond
the city, where the snow is on the verge
of breaking – and I keep thinking, bearing
witness is the deepest form of love.

In “Archives,” the speaker says, “I cannot seem to document/my own life./..../Yet things/come back to me/in flashes. Sometimes/I write them into fictions” (13). In “Autobiography,” the speaker says, “We invent: this is who I am” (30). In what way does inhabiting these places, witnessing them, also work toward an invention of the self?

I grew up with a sense of self that was defined by others, to the extent that as a child, I could not write the word ‘I’, for behind it was only the terror of the void. I internalized the stories that family and culture imposed on me—that I was not strong, not competent, not credible, that I should make myself small to be acceptable. Suffice it to say, it did not bring me to a good place. And when I became an adult, I knew on some level that I had to build a real foundation for my life.

The threads all blur now, but my travel, witness, and writing fed each other in ways that helped me build a sense of self. Writing is at the core of it, ultimately, for it is through writing I learned to narrate the world, be it my internal life or the history of a place I visited. It is through writing that I could build a richer and stronger story for myself.

At the same time, a large part of the mythos of the American West is that it is a place to escape the past and reinvent the self. It is a fantasy, of course, but it has been wielded to oppress non-white peoples in the West—the indigenous peoples, the Hispanic communities who did not cross the border, but the border crossed them, and yes, the Chinese migrant workers who I write about. But we can rewrite this myth too.

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

Melissa Febos’ Girlhood. I am still working through it, but she has created new frameworks to contend with the dark parts of girlhood. Much of it feels unspeakable precisely because we don’t have the language to talk about it, and Febos shows us some ways we can break this silence.

A lot of what I write looks out into the world rather than within. But I have a special affection for women writers who create lyrical, elliptical, and interior works. Some books I read as I worked on Faraway Places include Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, Louise Mathias’ The Traps, Cynthia Cruz’s Wunderkammer, and Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling.

Some Rogue Agent fans are just beginning to explore what making poetry about the body would look like for them. What advice would you give to someone looking for new ways to imagine embodiment, beyond the literally described experience of the body?

Writing the body is a lot more than writing sex and desire, though it certainly encompasses both. A decade ago, I took Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Ecstatic States” class, and her first assignment was to describe a sexual experience between ourselves and anything but another person. The idea was to expand our ideas of eros and embodiment, merging and connection. One of these poems grew directly from this assignment—I’ll let you guess which.

I don’t remember who said that the body remembers what the mind would rather forget. But I find that writing the body is a lot about learning to heed our instincts, going deeper when it gets uncomfortable, quieting the critic’s voice in our heads, and finding the authority that each of us have in ourselves. When we are embodied, we trust ourselves to tell the truth, whether about our lives or the larger forces of history. That is the real power of this work.

Leah Claire Kaminski

FLORIDA HIGH SCHOOL STATE CHAMPIONSHIPS, CLASS 3A, 1994

in between the coaches’ beds as their sun-creased bodies napped, in the canyon between beds on detergent-scented carpet, after morning heats where she swam fast but slow for the state and he swam fast for the state, after she swam 200 IM, 200 free, 100 free, 2 relays, & the whole thing so busy and without center, just fear, wet suits, & shaved limbs, caged mothers and their bones, after swimming as if she was without body, as if she was burning fear in a stomach and arms so smooth through water that they barely existed, there was one moment where she could have had a body that knew where it stood, that commanded armies of her, so many bodies of her to get up and take his hands out of her suit, where he was pressing too hard and it hurt and hurt mixed with fear till she thought it was lust, but the body she had burned till she thought maybe that was how it ended, and his tongue was thick flesh, and she became a body moving with no weight at all

Sarah Dickenson Snyder

A VANISHING

I can’t remember when exactly
I stopped believing I had
magical powers, my spells
soundless as they moved
through another dimension
touching a world on the edge
of this world, bending the rules
and prayers drilled into me,
but maybe
it was that day walking home alone
from school and two boys
leaped from the woods,
pinned me down in the dirt
and leaves and pine needles—
it must have been fall.
Their mouths taking
all of the oxygen,
their laughter and running
away, my re-entry shadowed
with a sky inscribed by branches,
sitting up and brushing off,
my mouth still feeling
like something was there.

I remember the seconds
of not-breathing, those seconds
falling inside me like a rock in a pond,
settled in the muck but still there
to see whenever the water clears.

And never telling anyone.
Making it just a kiss
as if a kiss would feel like that.

Jay Kophy

HAGIOGRAPHY

Bring me
to where
my blood runs

—Wanda Coleman

a half-baked body lying quietly on the ground
becomes evidence of the punishment of resistance
& we watch this still body. intently. as though it will
react to us making a memory of it

we don't mind the stench. we are used to death now
for what has history taught us
if not the many ways to rename blood
to replace loss with sacrifice

the price for this death is understanding
look at what you have made us into
even God. for a moment. questioned the purpose of blood
streaming out of a body when His son died
but maybe this is because He isn't from here
He isn't used to the stench of what He loves rotting in his hands
to say their name and taste absence instead of home 

this home is a religion of hunger & dissolution
everyday we wake up is a resurrection. a disobedience of the daily ritual

hallelujah!
another messiah has been found lying quietly on the belly
of the earth. limbs arranged like he's resting on a cross
with a placard in his hands saying:
in my father's house are many mansions
and I am going to prepare a place for you

Cam Hyer-Dawes

BRUISE

The window is left open
and lets the thick summer night spill
into the room
breaking the makeshift twilight
held there into fractals –
spreading it like shattered glass on a highway
taking in the glare of headlights. 

I have been scorching my lands
harvesting fire
and turning bruised fruit –
inkishly purple
and rotted sweet –
to ash.

I am erasing the sound of your voice.
I can’t hear it without wanting to cry.
I wish I could forget your hands a finger at a time
like clockwork
as if grief could be measured
as an empty space
to be filled.

I’ve memorized the carousel of shame
by its varnished surface –
the horse shapes
are impaled
and they turn and go
nowhere. The music
is an incantation
of swamp water
static television. 

I am emptying myself into drink.
I imagine sitting at the bottom of a motel pool
opening my eyes into the sting of chlorine
blurring my sight
the water swallows whole
an aquamarine brilliance:
paint on concrete walls.
Light dances underwater
you can watch it like you would watch a stag.
When I come up
I cup the water’s lukewarmth
and stare into the pond
I have made of my hands
seeing the skin that covers them.

Sara Quinn Rivara

CONFESSION

What did I know of loss
though I had stocked 
my life with it:
a husband who hated me 
nights in the fishing cabin
beneath a shallow sky
a poker game and porn
on the living room television
while I slept off a fever
empty beer bottles
on dirty tables. 
Sex meant leaving
a body I hated
for its insistence on existing.
A curdle of blood 
on the crotch
of my new lace panties
my husband bought 
at Frederick’s of Hollywood 
so I would transform 
into something more fuckable. 
Still, how I hated that word 
panties, how a man
can claim anything: 
a tree for felling
a woman’s small shoulders
beneath his hands, the horizon
he could tie into a noose
or unfurl into a road.
How can you lose
what you never believed
you deserved? the self
is an abandoned orchard,
windfall apples fermenting
in the late August sun.
I did not understand
until long after 
that I too
was a song
worth 
singing.

Issue 76 Contributors

Auzin is a writer in the Pacific Northwest. She is a chronic daydreamer, always cold, and usually in love. She hopes these are good qualities for a poet. Her work has appeared previously in Selcouth Station, Fahmidan Journal, and Hecate Magazine. She is also a joint Poetry Editor at Hecate Magazine. You can find more of her work at byauzin.com.

Cam Dyer-Hawes is a poet working and writing in central Massachusetts. His poetry publication debut, titled "Washitaw", appeared in The Adirondack Review, where he is now a staff member. He writes poems between stacking bales of hay at a horse farm and hopes to attend an MFA program this upcoming fall.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (Conundrum Press, 2016) and Faraway Places (Diode Editions, 2021). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in Tin House, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Rubin Hardin is a poet who adores magical realism. They founded a literary journal dedicated to non-speaking and semi-speaking disabled artists called Explicit Literary Journal. They have work published in Rising Phoenix Review, What Are Birds, Runestone, Crab Fat Magazine, Voicemail Poems, Can’t Somebody Fix What Ails Me, Iris Literary Journal, and Snarl. Hardin has upcoming work in Utterance and Snarl. Their favorite bird is a dragon.

Leah Claire Kaminski’s poems appear in places like Bennington Review, Fence, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and ZYZZYVA. Dancing Girl Press published the chapbook Peninsular Scar, and her full-length collection Live oak nearly on fire has recently been long- or short-listed at Tupelo Press, Harbor Editions, and Ghost Peach Press. Her honors include Grand Prizes from the Summer Literary Seminars and the Matrix/LitPOP awards, judged by Eileen Myles. Find her at www.leahkaminski.com.

Jay Kophy is a Ghanaian poet and writer. His poems are forthcoming and have been featured in literary magazines such as AGNI, FourWay Review, Indianapolis Review, Glass Poetry, Kalahari Review, Tampered Press and many others. He is the winner of the inaugural Samira Bawumia Literature Prize in poetry. He's also curator of anthologies to grow in two bodies and How to Write My Country's Name. You can find him on Twitter @jay_kophy.

Kathleen Mitchell-Askar holds degrees in English from UCLA and California State University, Northridge. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Spillway, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She works as an editor and lives in Sacramento with her three children.

Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of two collections, ANIMAL BRIDE (Tinderbox Editions, 2019) and LAKE EFFECT (Aldrich Press, 2013). Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Mom Egg Review, Indianapolis Review, Colorado Review, West Trestle, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate and author of four collections of poetry, including Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020 and Nightbloom & Cenote (St. Julian Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Pleiades, The Missouri Review, [PANK], Iowa Review, and Xicanx: 21 Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century (University of Arizona, 2022. She has collaborated or been commissioned for poetic projects with the city of Houston, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University. Currently, she teaches at Alma College’s low-residency MFA Program in creative writing.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera. She has been nominated for Best of Net, was the Poetry Prize winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a Finalist for Iron Horse National Poetry Month Award. Recent work has appeared in Rattle and RHINO. She lives in Vermont. sarahdickensonsnyder.com.  

Lindsay Young is a poet from New York. She is a Winter Tangerine alumnus, a 2020 Watering Hole fellow, and the author of Salt to Taste, her debut book of poetry published in the Summer of 2019. Her work has been published in The Mark Literary Review, The Offing Magazine, and elsewhere. She currently works as a freelance poet and workshop facilitator and is getting her MSW from Columbia University.