RogueAgent

ISSUE 82
CONTENTS

JANUARY 2022

Kristin Ryan
Sonnet Mondal
Megan McDermott
M.A. Scott
Bobby Bolt
INTERVIEW: Remi Recchia
Milton Ehrlich
Sarah Beddow
Raymond Luczak
Katherine Fallon
Russell Nichols

CONTRIBUTORS

Kristin Ryan

BEGINNING AND ENDING WITH A RECLINER

I.

I’m standing in my mother’s yellow kitchen,
studying the ripened avocadoes that we will
mash for my birthday celebration tomorrow.
I know you don’t want to hear this but
[…] is dying. Cancer. Hospice has been called.
He just sits in his recliner and stares out the window.
I swallow down my panic,
the bile, the feeling of his
fingernails and whiskers
across my skin as he rocks,
both of us rigid.
I take a sip of water.
Oh.
I try to shake the feeling
of bees swarming in
my limbs, my head.
I set the glass down
with a thud, water
sloshes over the rim.

II.

My friends wish him a slow, painful death.
I just want him gone.
That’s it.
The text comes as I’m thrashing
from a nightmare.
My phone falls off the couch,
and startles me awake.
[…] died this morning.
I close my eyes, wait for the relief.
It never comes. Instead, I throw up.

My jaw locks. I tremble for days with
a migraine so severe I’m left dry heaving.

I try to picture him in his last moments:
small, childlike, full of pain, and afraid,
just as I was, in that recliner,
pleading for it all to stop. 

Sonnet Mondal

IN FRONT OF A BURNING CORPSE

A corpse was burning in the burning ghat by the sea.
A dog was looking at me and whimpering. 

Amid the flaming sounds and laughter of waves
the sea seemed to be in a gossip with the skies
and the burning corpse looked like an ignited cigar — 
smoked by the rolling drunk waters.

I felt like an infant ghost     watching at its birth.

The tempting body caging the ghost
was leaving a world     which loves to forget.

Breathing seemed as trivial as the cries of the dog
and life was no longer a doubt.

The roaring clouds above     were like memories
warning of its presence     to the transforming soul.

The flickering sodium lights were trying
to lighten the worth of loving and leaving.

All that was spoken and done
floated like vain lies     over untiring waves.

I felt     I was someone else
and while battling to become     that someone else
I lost myself     like a trifling dot in the infinity.

Megan McDermott

FAITH ARROW SIGN - $11.09

That’s all it is - the word “Faith”
under an arrow, leaving the consumer
to choose where it points. The
kitchen? So faith becomes
present in feasting. Towards the
hallway? So it becomes about
transition, faith the thing that carries
us from one room to the next.
To the bedroom? So faith
becomes what I touched
when he touched me,
transcendent. Faith, believing
without any evidence that
one day someone will be
beside me in that bed again.

M.A. Scott

TO MY MASTECTOMY SCAR ON ITS 22ND BIRTHDAY

How I love this five inch stretch of skin
faded to the cream of a coral cameo

or bar of Camay soap. Nurses tell me
he did a beautiful job, with arcane  

precision, but a slight pucker
at the first stitch as if to say nobody’s

perfect. Praise be that little dimple
of impertinence, in the mirror, the shower,

the sunlight. In Manon of the Spring,
Ugolin collects Manon’s hair ribbon

and sews it through his chest as
a binding spell. Look what I have done,

just as close to the bone—carved
a hollow for you; lined it with rabbit fur.

A place to rest your head.

Bobby Bolt

SOME MORNINGS YOU KNOW IT BY THE SYMPTOMS

Index, middle, and thumb fingers
go numb right as they get to work,
even start to hurt a little in that
frostbitten way, which is to say
they ache with absence. Some heat
this body can only borrow.

Some mornings when I don’t know
where else to go I start with a title,
because I know best how to try
and live up to a better idea
of myself—calling out a stranger’s
name and hoping they’ll arrive.

I have been so unkind to these two
good hands; their softness only
a trick to hide the scrapes and scars
resulting from mostly looking too far
in another direction. Knowing where
you’re going is a real superpower,

you might as well say you can see
through walls. And in the Poetry
Hall of Justice they’re counting
all the ways a day might get saved
without showing up and razing
half the city. Some mornings you

know it by the symptoms: bedsheets
suddenly too heavy to leave, murky water
rising, sliding under the door and still I
must snap my bones into place and face
the day. This world is almost never
waiting, but still I say a quiet Thank you

to whatever I find outside, Thank you
for this invitation, for all this touching.

Remi Recchia talks about embodiment
and writing Quicksand/Stargazing

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?

For a long time, I avoided writing about my body. I think it started with the typical “baby poet” mindset: “But I want the reader to be confused!” There’s something thrilling about having a secret when you begin writing. But what do you do when neither you nor the reader is privy to the secret?  

The problem with such a secret, of course, is that you risk not connecting to the reader at all. While I don’t advocate writing to a specific reader—that is one of the pitfalls of workshop—I will assert that we need to be mindful that real people are reading our work. To that end, the body is something physical that I can present to the reader as a real, tangible thing to connect over. As a guy who transitioned from female to male through HRT about five years ago now, my body has changed a lot. These changes, ranging from facial hair to a deepened voice to top surgery, are represented in Quicksand/Stargazing. Post-transition, I was finally able to write about my body because it was finally mine.

In “Pastoral #1” (probably my favorite poem in the book), you write, “...I don’t want / you to know we’re alone, / so let me be your star.//We’ll paint the sky-canvas / splotchy cow colors / accented with sober love. // Keep me in the dark....” So many of the poems in Quicksand/Stargazing are what I would call love poems— to your wife, to family, to small moments of bliss. To what extent do you consider yourself a love poet?

When my editor, Adam Deutsch, and I had our initial phone call to talk about the book—or maybe this was actually in one of our first rounds of edits—Adam pointed out that one of the overwhelming themes of the book was marriage. As the two of us continued to work on the manuscript together, he was adamant that the collection retain its tenderness.

My mom says that when I was a baby meeting my grandparents for the first time, my grandma took one look at me and said, “(s)he’s right there!” What she meant by that, of course, is that at less than a year old, my personality was fully formed; you could see it on my face. That’s how I write poems: I’m right there (or, as my mom would say, I’m “all in”). When I’m sad, it’s the end of the world. When I’m in love, no one else has ever felt such ardor (I’m kidding as I write this!). But in all seriousness, I do feel things very strongly, so if I’m any kind of poet at all, I wholeheartedly embrace the title of “love poet.”

PASTORAL #1

The cows are misting
silent, burrowed in white
softness & sky-down.

I’m driving & you are
golden, counting seconds
against the digital

clock of our old car
(three accidents later,
motor still warm, dash

dented with a yellow
bruise). Do you ever
wish we weren’t here?

We are fixtures of other-
ness, one brown cow
among the spotted herd.

Rural eyes & cardinal 
sins, they are our gate-
keepers, as if we need

one reason to leave.
I want to say I’m used
to this turning, these fists

hovering over my small
face. I’m used to this 
orange scrutiny. But you

are not & I don’t want 
you to know we’re alone,
so let me be your star.

We’ll paint the sky-canvas
splotchy cow colors 
accented with sober love.

Keep me in the dark. Hold
dirty towels, always, stark
neon against the pasture.

The closer to this book is one heck of a powerful statement, kind of like the grand finale at a fireworks show. Unlike other poems in the collection, “Family Histories” makes such huge poetic leaps, from stanza to stanza and even within stanzas. Please comment on the writing process for this dazzling poem.

As its form suggests, “Family Histories” was drafted when I was in a manic episode. Nothing was planned ahead of time. I didn’t sit down and try to write about XYZ trauma, but I had just biked home from a therapy session and gone to my study, which faces the front yard of my wife’s and my two-bedroom apartment. We live in a quiet yet sketchy part of town—there aren’t a lot of college students in our neighborhood, which makes it peaceful, but there also aren’t any streetlights, which means that people can—and do—deal drugs literally under cover of night. Anyway, it was in the late morning and the summer Oklahoma sky was peaceful in a way that didn’t reflect at all what was going on in my head. I don’t have a great sense of time, but “Family Histories” came out all at once in maybe two to three hours. I shared it, quite trepidatiously, with a professor, who guided me in making some minor revisions. And that’s it. The sprawling, spiraling, rhyming lines and leaps in time from margin to margin? That’s what it’s like in my head about 40% of the time.

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

1. American Sunrise by Joy Harjo (Norton, 2019)

2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (Dial Press, 1956)

3. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (Graywolf Press, 2015)

4. Hard Damage by Aria Aber (University of Nebraska Press, 2019)

5. Hiding in a Thimble by Roseanna Alice Boswell (Haverthorn Pres, 2021)

6. The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Vintage, 2012)

7. The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert (Knopf, 1996)

8. The New Testament by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

9. The Spectral Wilderness by Oliver Bendorf (Kent State University Press, 2015)

10.  True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Emily Skidmore (NYU Press, 2017)

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?

You know, this is something a writer asked me just last week, and I gave a response that I worry was incomprehensible, so I’m glad for the chance to try again. I would say, first and foremost, if you’re not sure how to write poetry about the body, read all the poetry you can about it. In his book The Spectral Wilderness, Oliver Bendorf describes gender transition in such a way that is simultaneously lovely and firm.

But I think if someone is feeling shy about it, they should start with research. Is there a part of your body that you don’t know how to name? Do you have an underlying condition or chronic illness? Look it up and find all you can on the Internet, at the library, from a doctor. In my experience, at least, my brain knows when it’s done all the research it can and then needs to shape something with it. Hopefully that something turns into a poem.

Milton Ehrlich

NINETY YEARS OLD

Memory fades,
you can’t recall
day of the week,
a friend’s number
you call every day—
weep for no reason.
Everything hurts,
bowels on strike,
bladder flows when
it is shut off.
Can’t walk or talk
or hear anything.
A mirror shocks
you daily—lust but
a remote memory.
Help to do anything—
trim your nails
rise from a chair,
getting in and out
of a shower.
Somebody else
drives your car.
You keep following
orders of your
former sergeant:
Wipe that smile
off your face
soldier!

Sarah Beddow

BILDUNGSROMAN

I decide to be the kind of girl who can talk about masturbation with boys
on the trampoline behind Melissa’s house    I decide I can share   that
I figured out how when I was    in elementary school   before I even read
VC Andrews or Anne Rice  Before the line “pumping away like a piston”
finally revealed the mechanics   of the universe to my  hungry mind 
“Wait    are you admitting you masturbate” Finn exclaims with glee  
No other girls     to be seen   just a handful of boys   eyes popping
and bodies doubling over  
                                                I decide to be the kind of girl who   kisses
and does not tell   I decide to be the kind of a girl with a very    very
dirty mouth   The girl who says in class  “Bill Clinton isn’t in trouble
for banging an intern   he is in trouble for lying about it”   and making
my history teacher exclaim “Sarah!” while all my  classmates wonder
how I get away with  it and   how I got to be so smart anyway    I decide I
am    confident    I decide to be the girl who is always  subtly the smartest
person in the room   
                                    I do not tell anyone  when I fool around with Paul after
he unspools his heart’s longing for another   girl   whom he failed to impress
or   fool around with Finn in the backroom of the Birds Unlimited where we
recline across a pile of birdseed bags      Paul does not tell    Finn does  not
tell      I decide my    attitude is    key   If I   act blasé   if I act   in control
no one will     see  how much I want     to fall in love with anyone   
                                                                                                                     I decide
the boys  will fall  helplessly  in love with me   I will not have to ask   My body
is request enough   My natural command of any situation   will draw them
to me  I will be   as  fingertips   softly    brushing their arms in the hallway
I will be   a guilty pleasure    until I become    simply     a pleasure they cannot
live without   I will   be   a warm pocket   stuffed  with their secrets
Their loyalty to me  will have them feuding   over who will win my heart
because finally    they will see    having only my body   is not enough 

Raymond Luczak

TONGUE

When I close my mouth,
I feel the security blanket
of my tongue huddled
against the roof of
my St. Louis Arch
where alms for hunger
waterfall into the pits
of my burning hell.
May my tongue stopple
the bile rising from
what I’ve had to consume
in order to appreciate
the few rosebuds of sweet.
Each time I eat, I atone.

Katherine Fallon

DAPPLED

Skin pale as butter and prone as easily
to mar, I turn blue and green. Astride

my spine, your nails like scythes, I’ve got
marks like pie vents. I hover above you,

each thigh Dalmatian-fleshed, dully pocked
by your gentle, probing thumbs, your hips’

insistent knock against my own, a digit,
an apparatus. Having been marked,

I rejoice: evidence of influence,
proof any difference is ever made.

Russell Nichols

BREAD + WINE

fuck a recipe, you said.
you wanted to make it from scratch
to dig deep deep past the surface
of walls that keep your secrets
tempting them when speaking
in tongues to spill
this is my blood

confluencing for you
this is my body
getting broken the eff off
of course: love tastes
better made to order
your steps all wobbly

like walking on water
& water turns to
& words turn to
& we turn tables
re-mixing the last supper

into a supper that lasts
dying & coming; dying & coming
cups running & running over
& over

religiously: a pretzel
leavened language twisted
braided iconography

of you kneading
me kneading you

Issue 82 Contributors

Sarah Beddow is a poet, essayist, and mother. Her first book Dispatches from Frontier Schools is forthcoming from Riot in Your Throat Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in GlitterMOB, Lunch Ticket, Bone Bouquet, Measure, Entropy, and elsewhere, and she is the founding editor of the Pittsburgh Poetry Houses, a public art project. Find her online at impolitelines.com.

Bobby Bolt is a poet and educator who holds an MFA from Texas State University, where he was a 2019 Round Top Poetry Fellow and Poetry Editor for Porter House Review. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Rappahannock Review, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere.

MIlton Ehrlich, Ph.D. is a 90-year-old psychologist and a Korean War veteran. He has published many of his poems in periodicals such as the Toronto Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.

Katherine Fallon is the author of DEMOTED PLANET (Headmistress Press, 2021) and The Toothmaker's Daughters (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She is Lead Poetry Editor at MAYDAY and reads for [PANK]. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Juked, Meridian, Foundry, and Best New Poets among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. She shares domestic space with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.

Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 25 titles, including Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories (Modern History Press) and once upon a twin: poems (Gallaudet University Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the editor of the literary journal Mollyhouse. An inaugural Zoeglossia Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [raymondluczak.com]

Megan McDermott s a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. Her debut poetry chapbook, Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating, was published by Ethel micro-press last year. Her poems have also been published in a number of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Neologism Poetry Journal, 8 Poems, and Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. Connect with Megan more at meganmcdermottpoet.com or on Twitter @megmcdermott92.

Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the author of Karmic Chanting, and five other books of poetry. He serves as the director of Chair Poetry Evenings-Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival and managing editor of Verseville. His latest book of poetry is An Afternoon in my Mind.

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he got rid of all his stuff in 2011 to live out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world ever since. Look for him at russellnichols.com.

Remi Recchia is a poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for GASHER. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. Two of his poems have been published on Poets.org as winning pieces for a University & College Academy of American Poets Prize. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. He is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021). Remi's chapbook, Sober, is forthcoming with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2022.

Kristin Ryan is a poet and essayist working on healing, and full sleeves of tattoos. Her work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Jabberwock Review, Moonchild Magazine, and Serotonin Lit. She earned her MFA from Ashland University. She tweets @kristinwrites.

M.A. Scott’s work has recently appeared in Sugar House Review, Miracle Monocle, McNeese Review, and Moon City Review. She grew up in Rhode Island and currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley where she likes to spend time with trees, cats, and tarot cards.