RogueAgent

ISSUE 79
CONTENTS

OCTOBER 2021

Eye Sinkhole Tabitha III
Vismai Rao
Heather Pease
Abril Garcia-Linn
Sossity Chiricuzio
ART: Maurice Moore
Juanita Rey
Richelle Buccilli
Federica Santini
Cassandra Whitaker

CONTRIBUTORS

Eye Sinkhole Tabitha III

MOUTH MEDITATIONS

He tells me to bite down.
I say, I can’t.
What do you mean you can’t?
I can only bite up. I can’t lower my upper jaw.

Don’t they teach you that in dental school?

He asks if I grind my teeth in my sleep.
I ask how I’m supposed to know what I do in my sleep.
If someone sleeps next to you, they’d hear it and you’d know.
So I invite him to sleep next to me.

How many mouths can I create for myself?
How many mouths are too many?

Consider: laughter.

Consider a street named
for the opposite of what you’ve always been.
Consider whether you’re predisposed to join a cult,
the predisposition of a Botoxed lip.

I’m watching a comedy special.
I’m twisting my tongue.
I’m searching for an aphorism
for the taste of my own buds.

Sometimes my jaw gets stuck.
As a child my legs locked
when I folded them into a W
and my whole body went mute.

And here I am brushing too aggressively again.
Here I am receding.

We’re in your kitchen
doing a blindfolded taste test
of all the foods you hate. 

You chew your cheek and count
one. two. three.
before you ask me something big.

I’m singing on a tiny stage
and at least three people hush their dates
to say, hey, listen to this one.

Vismai Rao

LOSING WORDS

All night it rained in my mouth.
The neuron for cloud had burst.

My sinuses flooded. Tongue, wet
& passive—Someone tried 

to summon sunshine but it was too
late—By midnight the deluge was at

my knees, where scars from a gentle kneeling
at the beach mistook the water for wave,

waited for the sea
to recede—If sand could hold moisture,

I would have dreamed desert.
In the soles of my feet reside

memories of soil: parched riverbed,
mowed lawn, mounds marking

a patchwork of rice-fields. I witnessed
as each rose to the occasion—

by morning I’m left
an island of trees. Beyond my reach

a word for feathers
of water caught in a breeze—

Heather Pease

DO AS I’M TOLD
an abecedarian

A poem like this should not be written;
because it reveals an awareness of abuse and
concealment of a daughter’s truth through manipulation, 
dodging, or denying deceitfulness.  
“Exaggerator” was borne as a moniker by this mother’s daughter.
Forgetfulness is such a convenient alibi to challenged memories. 
Girls are supposed to be sweet, should love their mother, girls should be polite.  
How does it go? Sugar and spice, everything nice?
I tuck tears under a pillow for safe keeping
Just be a quiet little brat, don’t sass back.  
Kisses don’t make everything better.
Let’s deny the strange feeling in my tummy from her tickling fingers. 
Mommy is dearest, everyone adores her.
Now straighten up, it’s time to pretend for company that
our home is always a happy one.
Perfectly perfect and pious in public 
Quiet is hiding in a closet, with a stuffed mouse 
Reality is a slammed fist, a threat of a belt then the
spanking -- on bare bottom, panties in a puddle on the floor
The hot red slashes stayed for days to teach me a lesson I never  
understood other than to fear her rage, threats are real, only I made her mad.   
Value in my family granted if I comply, swallow her denial as my truth
Worth unattainable –no matter how hard I tried to be good  
Xtreme revulsion of a skin I wanted to crawl out of with each tickle between thighs
You shouldn’t write poems like this, I say to myself, instead I should 
zip it and do as I’m told.

Abril Garcia-Linn

CUTS

Sometimes I used a sewing needle 
I preferred a safety pin 
safely hidden in my pocket
I’d thumb it often 
Sometimes I’d hide it in my mouth
Once I swallowed it

The tear of skin
basically painless
Almost no blood

inkless tattoos
I gave myself
barely visible 
my clothes covered
the scribbled scars

There was no thought
To what I was doing
My body was my canvas
It was mine 
only mine

His greedy hands could not
Stop me

Sossity Chiricuzio

ROCK OUT, STUCK IN

The pain is so loud I want to scream, break things,
knock down walls and I can’t even walk without lurching

I crank the Led Zeppelin up extra loud and rock in this chair
tap the foot on the leg that isn’t aching today and remember

the feel of mosh pit, the feel of folding into meditation pose, of
running and wrestling and dancing and loving so hard

Crank the music up louder, press hard on my forehead
Drown out the fear, shake in this chair and remember

Not to bite my own lip until it bleeds even though blood is a satisfaction
I remember, like dance is a joy I remember like walking for miles

is a freedom I remember, crank the music up louder
tap into the feeling of before pain, before the compromises

When movement was simple, when my body was newly reclaimed
strong and supple and ready to move or relax into stillness

too much stillness now, feels like stagnant, feels like thwarted, feels
like I don’t get to choose, or like choosing is preservation not exploration

I need hard edges, need to throw myself around and scream at the sky
Need the salt of hours of sex, of being on hands and knees gardening

I’m singing along like the howl of a wolf left lonely, like the leaves of a willow
weeping in a storm, like nobody is listening because I can’t leave the house

crank the music up louder, the tears pressing harder until my face cracks
wide open and sobbing along, until the shatter is outside more than in

Maurice Moore

BODY DYSMORPHIA (FEAT. TRANS IS BEAUTIFUL)

BODY EUPHORIA (FEAT. TRANS IS BEAUTIFUL, BIG BOI ENERGY)

BODYSCAPE (FEAT. THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK)

Artist statement:

Rendering while black is an exploration of sensorial feel/felt lines both in text and performative drawings involving 2D,3D,4D, and Speculative fiction(s) art practices. Moreover, the work explores how Black, Indigenous, Queer, and People Of Color (BIQPOC)'s have created a means of survival through visual/performance art, creating a mode(s) of active radical resistance. These mode(s) draw upon performative traditions including call and response, improvisation, reading, throwing shade, and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). My pieces extrapolate theories both from queer of color critique and Black foodways, synthesizing different dialects of an innovative visual/text languages. Mixing elements of Black foodways and Black Music into my art practice has broadened my sense of what it means to reconstruct while simultaneously deconstructing the Black body. In my work, the lines created literally intersect, overlap, and make fluid many of the diasporic identities that colonial powers would have me believe are fixed. By doing this work I can reimagine ways to fight anti-Blackness, queer-antagonism, the erasure, and the deafening silences caused by colonial powers. In short, these processes of making renew the vitality of queerness and/or blackness in both my current artistic practice and in my scholarly pursuits.

Juanita Rey

IN WITH THE NEW

I want him to see me in it.
How I look in the mirror
is mere invention on my part.
I turn to the side, left then right.
I stare straight on.
But it is only glass staring back at me.
Yes, this new outfit
follows the curves of my body.
It’s a bathing suit.
That’s its mission.

But when he walks with me,
then it’s a whole other article of clothing.
When we stroll along the sand,
with the water curling up around my toes,
it must do the work of skin,
drive him as breathless
as the open sea.

The bare arms and legs,
the sun that accentuates my brownness,
thin strings that tie it at the throat,
the silky movement that hangs around in his thoughts
after we part for the day,
maybe even years from now –
he must remember how I look half-naked.

But for now it’s just me and the mirror.
I’ve never thought of us as a couple.

Richelle Buccilli

BIRTHING ROOM

There was weather in the room.
Baskets of hot blood, waves

of a hurricane rising on the monitor.
And not like the movies at all.  

Nothing about this, loud.
I was the red leaves

tearing from their own limbs,
slow peeled parings of skin

from our cuticle flesh, delicate—
the first pulling into winter.

Each contraction like each of my teeth,
this is the way a daughter becomes a mother.

My breaths slow, strong like wind,
my heartbeat scattered itself in the room

like wrens. If my hands had been claws,
I could have made my husband holy,

hanging from the hoodie on his chest
like something primal. At seven centimeters,

my body a lioness let loose in my gown.
Dear body full of desire, body full of fruit,

you were made to bear this,
you were made to root.

Is this the feeling of feeling the earth?
This is the room rising inside me.

Yes, unhinge me:
heavy long needle that I needed to feel.

These fists unclenched from the sweet hands
of a nurse, these fists opened like petals and wings—

my eyes unglazed, freed—
my spine was a long blade, the ice skates                                                     

salvaged from the closet—
a body both gliding and numbed—

and another body
feeling all of it,

headfirst,
leaving mine.

Federica Santini

GONE

Small brown foot, unconcerned and tough
in its rubber slip-on, unknown symbol, faded
asphalt steaming, the few trees vibrate in the heat
as we run in freedom, hiding in a wild game of light
and the known shadow under the half-lowered shutter
I smell old cigarettes and the sweet, sickly coyness
of the ice cream fridge stocked to the top,
mixed with chalk from the upended pool game

The unwanted hand on my chest startles,
a foreign object detached as the last summer
of childhood melts into shame unknown

Cassandra Whitaker

TWO BOYS IN A ROOM IN A DISINTEGRATION LOOP

A boy sitting in a room with a boy who is a mirror of the boy sitting in a room with a boy in a room bristled with light. Light purring, purring fire, machinery purring and thrumming the floor so that all vibrate, and the boy sitting in a room with a boy can feel the other’s boy’s weight lying on the opposite fold of a long wave of sound which is light humming, light vibing through the floor so that all are joined in one long wavelength. As a boy begins to comb his hair the other boy begins to comb his hair and the static from the comb is enough to spark the air and two boys become charged and with their charges begin to grow out their hair as if their hair were pulled from their core by the comb, the comb cresting and curling like a wave and the hair cresting and curling as it combs out of the boys in a room of white bristled light that hums and vibes and connects the boys in one long wavelength. Pretty soon the boys are pretty and hair has fallen down around their feet which flow in waves of hair, in lengths of light, in a room where two boys comb their hair, the hair having lapped and curled and cut around in swirls and eddies and branches of rivers that collect and fall into oceans of hair in a room where a boy vanishes into another body and into another body the boy vanishes, the hair now the ocean, the ocean now the question for all answers.

Issue 79 Contributors

Richelle Buccilli’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Main Street Rag, Sweet Tree Review, Yes Poetry, and Rogue Agent, among others. She was a finalist in SWWIM's "SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It" Contest for her poem, “Self-Portrait with Acorns.” She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son and is expecting her second child this Fall.

Sossity Chiricuzio is a fat femme outlaw poet, a working class crip storyteller. A Lambda Fellow, the CNF Editor for Gertrude Press, and half of the performance duo Sparkle & truth, they are the author of the memoir Honey & Vinegar: Recipe for an Outlaw, and are found in places like The Rumpus, Stirring, Salty, Pulp, Lunch Ticket, Rooted in Rights, Vox Viola, and Crab Fat. More info at: sossitywrites.com, and on social media @sossitywrites.

Abril Garcia-Linn is a proud Chicana from San Antonio, Texas. She is an artist, writer, performer, teacher and mother. She has worked teaching sewing classes and ESL to immigrants and refugees for the past 10 years. She is a founding member of the poetry/performance group Women of Ill Repute:Refute. Her poems are published in several anthologies. Her original play “The Altar” was showcased at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 2019.

Maurice Moore is currently a doctoral Performance Studies Candidate at the University of California-Davis. His creative work has appeared in Existere Journal, bozalta Collective, Harbor Review, Rigorous, Harpy Hybrid Review, Wicked Gay Ways, and Storm Cellar Journal. Lastly, he has exhibited at the Medford Arts Center in New Jersey, Memorial Union Gallery in Fargo North Dakota, the International House Davis (I-House) in Davis California, Christina Ray Gallery in Soho New York.

Heather Pease’s book of poetry is Out of the Weeds. Her poetry centers on mental health, feminism, self-acceptance, healing, and aims to make people think about subjects often stigmatized through society. Her work has appeared in various print anthologies and lit journals. She lives in Southern California.

Vismai Rao’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Salamander, Indianapolis Review, RHINO, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pithead Chapel, Psaltery & Lyre, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology. She serves as Poetry Editor for The Night Heron Barks.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine, and Porter Gulch Review.

Federica Santini lives in Atlanta, GA, and teaches at Kennesaw State University. She holds an MA from the University of Siena, Italy, and a PhD from UCLA. Her work has been published widely in North America and Europe. She is a 2021 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Fellow. Her chapbook, Unearthed, is forthcoming with Kelsay Books.

Eye Sinkhole Tabitha III was named after an egg. She has touched every item at Trader Joe's and she flosses her teeth regularly. You can send love letters to her at eyesinkholetabitha3@gmail.com.

Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a trans writer from Virginia. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in Conjunctions, Foglifter, Whale Road Review, Beestung, Evergreen Review, Hobart, and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle.