RogueAgent

ISSUE 91
CONTENTS

OCTOBER 2022

Danielle McMahon
Glen Armstrong
Austin Kuntz
Jimmy Pappas
Heikki Huotari
Helena Mesa
Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Taiwo Hassan
Justin Groppuso-Cook
JC Alfier

CONTRIBUTORS

Danielle McMahon

ON THE PROBABILITY OF MY MOTHER BEING RELEASED FROM PRISON

Maybe it will be spring and I’ll be waiting in my best
Sunday dress with knocking knees, holding
a pink carnation and a Hallmark
for the occasion.  Maybe

you will stumble over the curb
in your courtroom heels and ask
me for cash to pay the jitney
driver before you say hello.  Maybe
we’ll have coffee and cheesedogs

on the seedy side of town and I’ll pull threads
of forgiveness from my fingertips and clasp your clammy hands
in my own.  Maybe, at that moment, a pearl will divine itself
in our palms and we will finally be understood. 

Maybe, then, we can howl together
the way that women do.  Maybe your moth-eaten blouse
will droop from your shoulders because you are so, 

so sorry.  Maybe not.  Maybe we will say nothing
at all and I’ll watch your eyes the way I watch
my own in the mirror and I’ll crush
one cigarette out after another in the same patch
of ashtray until the table is black and blue.  Maybe

we’ll see the reflection of ourselves
out on the sidewalk.  You will be the mother
carrying a jug of milk in capable arms and I
will be the child

chasing redfooted pigeons.

Glen Armstrong

LEGS

Everyone remembers me.
As the boy with the crooked legs.
Though I could barely write.
My name.
I drew excellent kegs.
Of dynamite.
I stayed up every night.
With a flashlight and a pair of dice.
From the Yahtzee game.
I had a crush on the number five.

I had a Felix the Cat.
Without a head.
That used to contain bubble bath.
The right pair of pants.
Straightened certain things out.
I wore boot-cut jeans.
Two sizes too big.
With a belt and they would whisper.
About my legs.
Rather than point and shout.

Austin Kuntz

ANGRY FROG

On the crossroad theater, not yet dim lit by streetlamps,
I stagger by holding a scarf close to the lump in my throat,
fearing the waiting spotlight cars have revealed me not pretty
enough to wear a dress. Interrupting my final step onto the sidewalk
is a stump. It’s knotted with bumps so familiar to me, on my neck
and on everything that I try to hide. Grass, leaves, moss like stray hairs 
that just won’t see the stump as dead. The overcast is a blessing, 
and makes me wish to sit as a frog here and croak my displeasure 
at the lack of rain, complaining a wish without a wishful tone that 
the sky will open to slime my skin and glisten every warted bump: 
The angry frog would shine and bulge further the lump in her throat
bellowing louder so that all those revealed by the rain would hear the
anger of a transsexual woman. I am not made for your comfort,
she would croak and croak all the drizzle for all the bloated drivel
she has had to endure. She could endure if only walks could end
on a stump. But they can’t, and I return to myself with only
the wish, this time well in-toned, that I could croak like her.

Jimmy Pappas

CRUMBLING

I am crumbling.
Pieces of me are falling to the floor.
I have to vacuum myself up twice a week.
You can find me in the dust bunnies under the stove.
My skin is a goatskin sack holding my innards together.
I cover myself in the finest lotions to slow the process down.
I was told dust was mostly skin but I researched it and learned
it was not true. But who can say better than I can who I am,
where I am, and how to find me. When I stared at the dust
between my floorboards, I saw myself. That's me, I said.
I should know me when I see me. The dust is a mirror
that treats me like a defiant child who will not listen.
It explains to me who I am and what I will become.
When the Mona Lisa was stolen, people lined up
to see the empty square. When I am gone,
will anyone line up to observe
my absence?

Heikki Huotari

AUTOIMMUNE

Helena Mesa

OUR BODIES STOOD LIKE HOUSES

Dear friend, we wanted it—
the rain—before too much,
before sweeping steps,
porches, the water flooding
the street and yard, cars
overturned like bowls.

We were close
then. Loveless and
calloused, you said, enough
to hold back loss.

Old friend, my hands ache,
the grip too tight. 

It would be better
to let the water in.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman

MRI MACHINE

Strapped inside this bright rocket, you are a spirit ready to be launched toward the light. A technician watches through the window. A wire goes into your ear through which her voice arrives. The robotic dial clocks the years you’ve lived in pain. Lie still. You’ve been good. You’ve persevered. The hum and snap of magnets turns a mechanical halo around your brain. Music blooms from the end of the wire. A child sings a song that will play in your head for months, tangling in the nub of disquiet deep inside your neck. Nothing changes. You will tense your shoulders just as always, until the birds perched there are bound into your fascia and cannot fly away. They will sing the song of worry that accompanies you to your grave. The real one. The one you do not come out of as you do today, sliding back into the fluorescence of the examination room, where a hand now clasps you by the wrist to help you up.

Taiwo Hassan

OF THINGS THAT CAN’T BE FOLDED INTO METAPHORS

i have no vivid memory of ever hugging you.
but yesterday, after our phone conversation,

something about your last response felt like
frail arms, stretched and a warm body reaching to shield me,

as if to say this is what an embrace feels like, Táyélolú.
& suddenly, i'm torn between immersing myself in this

strangeness and allowing my body become a conductor for this
shock or leaving this as it is: just another bland feeling, a hot cup of tea that always seems to scald my tongue.

is this what it means to swallow the saliva of closure
& yet, watch your throat struggle at dissecting its accent?

here i am, beating heart, stubborn body and tired soul, trying to grapple with
the reality that some things can't be folded into metaphors

and loving a man is a poem filled with them.
the reality that in some delicacies, salt

can be sweet and tears can be everything but a plea of salvation, a flag soaked in blood.

Justin Groppuso-Cook

SELF-PORTRAIT AS PEACOCK

Peacocks eat poisonous snakes unharmed, which led to the belief
that they convert the venom into the iridescence of their plumes.

For a thousand days I ate nothing. Then a snake. 
Then two. Swallowed them

still alive. Ate more
& more enraptured in the taste. Like a drug

their bodies occupied my body,

coiled; I dragged myself through
perpetual war. Their fangs

sunk into my sacrum, the venom a delicacy

that rose into my brow—feathers shed
achromatic. Gave them

to the Churning of this Ocean of Milk,
the widening world.

Grew out my hair. Dyed

the curls with the toxin, a tonic. Blue-necked:
dressed up my abuse in paisley,

my lashes in a thick purple glitter. Electricity

tickled my hips, surged to the furthest
reaches of my extremities— 

the charmer caught in a fever of lust. Curled
my coccyx, dug my toes

into the earth: I understood balance as a blade  

of grass. My ribs quivered like wind
chimes as my mouth emptied with the molt

of every snake intertwined into an amulet.
This amulet I planted between

my temples a crown.

JC Alfier

TRANSGENDERED ODE TO MY ENDOCRINOLOGIST

I have failed to tell this more simply.
     But it breaks down to this:
        the meds she charted on my endocrine

blood-map reached back to my mother’s womb
     well before the biblical imprint
        of circumcision scored the shadow-country

of a woman yet-to-be born — decades off
     in the eunuch-making blue pill
        I down with tapwater in the small hours,

in the estrogen gel I spread across my thighs
     each daybreak like a sheen of frost, my birth name
        unweaving like the wingdust

of a mourning dove printed on the windowpane
     of my childhood bedroom, a crescent whisper
        suspended just beyond reach.

Issue 91 Contributors

JC Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Journal & Press (2020). Other books include Southbound Express to Bay Head – New Jersey Poems (2015) and Idyll for a Vanishing River (2013). Journal credits include Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Faultline, Hotel Amerika, New York Quarterly, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press.

Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. He has three current books of poems: Invisible Histories, The New Vaudeville, and Midsummer. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and The Cream City Review.

Justin Groppuso-Cook is a Writer-in-Residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project and Poetry Reader at West Trade Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Crab Creek Review, EcoTheo Review, Luna Luna Magazine, and Prometheus Dreaming among others. He received the 2021 Haunted Waters Press Award for Poetry and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook, "Our Illuminated Pupils", was a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow Press). In 2022, he was a resident at Writing Workshops Paris. More information can be found on his website, www.sunnimani.com.

Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and a vocalist. A Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space and several other places. He emerged the first runner-up for the MANI 10 year anniversary Poetry Competition. He's also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria. His first chapbook, Birds Don't Fly For Pleasure is forthcoming for publication by River Glass Books.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer. Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Fence, Smartish Pace, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia / mathematics he has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Spillway, The American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fifth collection, When Correlation Is Causation, will be available in early 2022.

Austin Kuntz is a poet local to Pittsburgh and a 2021 graduate from the University of Pittsburgh's undergraduate poetry program. Her writing explores perception of the body, often focused on hair and told through the lens of transition. She has mainly used her own poetry as a means of self exploration with this being the first appearance of her work in a publication.

Danielle McMahon graduated with a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh writing program in 2006. She has been previously published in Spinning Jenny (Issue 9) and Wicked Alice (Fall 2007), under her maiden name.

Helena Mesa is the author of Horse Dance Underwater and an editor for Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches at Albion College.

Jimmy Pappas received an MA in English literature from Rivier University. Published in over 100 journals, he is the Zoom moderator for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. His poem "Bobby's Story" was one of ten finalists in the 2017 Rattle Poetry Contest and won the 2018 Readers Choice Award. It is included in his first book Scream Wounds, a collection of poems based on veterans' stories. He was the winner of the 2019 Rattle chapbook contest for Falling off the Empire State Building. His YouTube interview with Tim Green is on Rattlecast #34.