RogueAgent

WELCOME TO ROGUE AGENT’S fourTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! A HEARTFELT THANKS TO OUR AUTHORS, ARTISTS, AND READERS WHO HAVE MADE IT POSSIBLE. MAD LOVE TO YOU!

ISSUE 49
CONTENTS

APRIL 2019


Frances Boyle
Louisa Schnaithmann
Jillian M. Phillips
Ferral Willcox
Sara Moore Wagner
INTERVIEW: ire’ne lara silva
Joylanda Jamison
Sarah Lilius
Cindy Veach
Kate Wright
Brynn Martin

CONTRIBUTORS

Frances Boyle

ALL I AM DUMB TO TELL

Stems knot and grow along my veins, branches
in grey-white landscape: low hills and lake. Ache
in my steps along boulders on the frozen road, steps
resonating up through my soles, a trudge
in my chest. That frisson I feel, the shimmy

of unreality in the way a tree trunk slants and bends,
grows somehow inside, beanstalk push. Burls
shape themselves in time-lapse, make sculpture
behind my lungs. Shadow land. The uncanny is breath
on back of neck. Voice of an unknown elder,

my father’s mother, perhaps, or some bad fairy. Spaces
urging me to tell, to know, to probe. Shedding light
creates shadow, and a single dry leaf pivoting on its
stem
pulls at a place beneath my ribs. A knot in my neck
twangs when a muscle low on my back is kneaded.

Fascia current hums within me, spider-silk wispy
and adhesive, tensile vines reach out. Hungry
for daylight, they are etiolated, warped in growth to turn
towards the shaded window. Outside is blurred softness
like blanket edge. Not sky blue but snowbank shadow
blue.

January afternoon, the crisp edges of wind-whipped
snow dunes have dulled to rolling ripples, open-ended
hush in soft pour. Light through bandy-legged
clouds, confections across the clean expanse.
Enigma opening its valves, spilling absence.

It flows in endings and beginnings, untampable
gush of emptiness. The softness a sponge, brief comfort
soaking up sorrow. But the surge continues, it blinds my
eyes
like tears while driving, some reckless plunge down
snow
corridors, wheels crunching, fenders scraping

unplowed drifts congealed to pebbly slush.
Windshield as fogged as my heedless vision, tunneling
through the loneliness — worth, gains and losses toted,
found to add up to a gaping space, emptiness fuller
at the horizon, a wanting wasting vein, unmined.

Louisa Schnaithmann

ON THE PROBLEM OF WOMANHOOD

I. 

I rip my veins
right out at
sixteen, red
ribbons that burn.

I tear what I
can, read
Ariel, full
of ghosts. 

II.

The body is
uncanny, womanhood
doubly so.

My body is a tree,
overgrown with ivy,
roots arcing

out of rocks, wrenching,
resisting. I associate
poetry with growth,

note how fine-trimmed
metaphor blooms
into truth, its

fruit bursting
in puckery thickets—
some sort of berry.

My body as tree,
scarred bark-skin
shed, fruit rotting.

III.

What is the problem
of womanhood?

IV.

When we were girls, we:
climbed, swam, jumped,
crawled, leapt, spun, sung,
wept, were trapped, sprang
free, fell asleep in hammocks
under cool breeze and late
sun.

There is a casual freedom there,
but it doesn’t last.

V.

What is the problem
of the body? We’re
trapped here, hands
stretching skyward,
aching for more.

VI.

Darkness.
I walk home alone.
My body is no
longer a tree. Now,
it is a target, a finely
crafted hymn of desire.

I try to be a tree.
I reach out and up,
hoping to transform
like Daphne. My skin
bristles. Bark, perhaps?
I spin my head around—
leaves do not grow.

I avoid the assumed
fate. My life line escapes.
I live to see morning.

VII.

The problem—
The problem is—
The problem of woman is—

She takes up space.
She contains.
She abstracts.
She defines.
She multiplies.
She grows.

VIII.

After red, and after
pills, and after ambulances
and their bills, somehow
I figure something out.

I am not so full of ghosts.
(Or they are more
properly contained.)

IX.

Trees get to grow wild.
Trees get to grow.

X. 

Thirty and alive:
a miracle!

I speak in tongues.
I edit my own work.
I speak in ciphers.
I do not write for men.

My work is unfinished

Jillian M. Phillips

ONE RULE FOR LINE BREAKS

Avoid "feminine endings," 
the unaccented syllable. 

I am a woman: 
I have no accent? 
I'm not the last word? 

How depressing  
that I am not a good line 
for even a bad poem. 
Or am I a poem at all? 

Perhaps I am a syllable. 
An unaccented syllable 
in a long, lush word 
only scholars and poets use correctly 

because I am a languorous exercise for the tongue
and the effort I require, 
a satisfying medal for the best mouths. 

Ferral Willcox

WINTALIN
from “Glossary of Snow”

a greyblue snow that lingers in shadows when other snow has melted

Snow scraps in shadows stay in places where she wore her lace, between the legs of trees in shadows where she hid her face from rape and tales of rape; frost stays in traces after cancer, whispered rumors of underfeather, tumors where she wore her scraps, a lace of ice tatted to ash in dendritic patterns. This is her body, what’s left of see-through winter after cancer, slit womb spills tales of tumors in places snow scraps stay, a lace of rape and tales of rape. This is her body, scattered host in the hollows of rotted frost, rumors of extracted masses chanted at her back as she passes across a tattered damask of cancer, decayed into dendritic lace of rape and tales of rape, shroud of cold earth laid on the body of a girl child at birth.

Sara Moore Wagner

A STUDY ON CRACKING

I practice what to tell my doctor:
I have been sad, I am sad, there is nothing
wrong with my life, the sun rises
gold over the backyard, the dog
curls herself into my thigh; at night,
I close my eyes and sleep comes easy,
in the shower I think of ways
to die like I think of groceries,
appointment times. I don’t think
of ways to die, no, I am happy, see
these lines at the corners of my eyes,
how they fork out like the flames
in the gas burner, how I am
holding it together, the way
the eggs do the rest of it, the way
the eggs turn solid, the way the eggs do.

ire’ne lara silva talks about embodied poetry
and writing Cuicacalli: House of Song

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?

I read a quote last week that’s been on my mind ever since: “The body is the ground of [all] thought.” (Gloria Anzaldúa)

Which led me to think about why Cuicacalli happened as it did. When it did. Blood Sugar Canto was a deliberate and in some ways systematic attempt to dismantle my own fear, to dissect what diabetes had been and would be in my life.  

The truths and issues in Cuicacalli have been with me my entire life—as a child, as a college student turned activist, as a poet, and through my adult artistic/lived/intellectual life. I’ve explored the themes of indigeneity, culture, language, myth, history, oppression, and freedom many times in many ways through the years, but what made Cuicacalli coalesce for me the way it did was an intense experience of rebirth—whole-bodied rebirth—that I lived in 2018. By whole-bodied, I mean a rebirth of heart/mind/body/soul. I’d never even remotely thought that it would be possible, at 43, to feel everything in life become new again. I think I was giddy for an entire year. I seem to be settling down now—and definitely missing all the energy that came with the giddiness.

The poems in Cuicacalli burst out of me. It’s my fourth book and the first one I didn’t cry my way through. My brother laughed at me when I said it was the most joyous writing experience I’d ever had. He said, “But so many of the poems have rage in them!” Which made me laugh because it’s true. But that made it no less a joyous experience for me. Writing about the body…writing the body…writing in an embodied way… Cuicacalli was about freedom, and what is more joyous than freedom? To say, here, in these ways, I’ve been unnamed and alone. In these ways, I know truths that others won’t let me claim. In these ways, I have returned to myself, to my body, to my heart. In these ways, my ancestors have survived and survived. In these ways, I have channeled my rage at past and ongoing injustices and made song. In these ways, I say I am not separate, not alone, but part of a larger body, a larger story.

In this book, which is densely layered with violent beauty and incantatory bravery, my favorite poem actually occurs near the beginning. “Walking the chupacabra” is brilliant in the way that it externalizes generational rage in to a legendary beast that the speaker has (only somewhat) domesticated. Where did you get the idea for this poem? How did it come to be?

It was a random Facebook prompt from my friend, the poet Deborah Miranda. Her dog’s nickname was “Chupacabra,” and one morning her wife asked her if she was going to walk the Chupacabra. Deborah had loved the sound of it but didn’t think it was a poem that she was called to write and so offered it up. I immediately wrote the first version of “Walking the Chupacabra” in the comments of that FB post.

I’m fascinated by readers’ interpretations of this poem. ‘Generational rage’ is an interesting take on it. That this is how we live with the rage we have inherited. Conscious, wary, and afraid but inarticulate to the extent that all we can do is describe the task, describe the return home, describe the home itself. By its very nature, a chupacabra is a wild thing, an untameable, unknowable thing. Which I would argue is what our history is too—as much as we may study it or hear about it. Someone once told me, history is facts, all names and dates and places. Even when I was nineteen, I thought that was one of the stupidest things I’d ever heard. What can we know that way—by name and date and place? We learn mostly by story, by consequences, by motivations, by conflict, by experience, and by empathy. We recognize the truth of history in our very bodies. These bodies that have lived the consequences of history, of conquest, of violence.

And that is what it is to live with the Chupacabra, to try to care for it. It is to know what our bodies know. What we can’t let ourselves forget.

WALKING THE CHUPACABRA
for Deborah Miranda

every morning we put the leash around his rough furred neck let him take the lead out the door and onto the sidewalk while the neighbors look askance at us we walk the chupacabra every morning or shall we say he consents to let us walk him and we walk on the balls of our feet here we are walking the chupacabra or shall we say walking the threat of violence walking the shadow of imminent death we walk on the balls of our feet and breathe rapidly ready to run should he decide to turn and maul us should he become unable to hold his hunger in check not hunger for flesh but hunger to see life spilled life burst life ended

we walk the chupacabra praying under our breaths hesitating when he stops to inspect a bush or a butterfly or a dog walking down the opposite side of the street we never hesitate when he decides to change direction we speed our steps almost trip over ourselves we walk the chupacabra or shall we say we walk danger incarnated walk rage concentrated in a four-legged form we turn back when and only when his eyes turn homewards and his horns cast shadows he waits while we open the lock on the door while we remove the leash while we pour water into his bowl and use a knife on our hands to add enough of our blood so that he’ll always recognize us we do not serve him anything to eat we still don’t know what he eats he has no bed sometimes we find him asleep on the ceiling

at night we sleep in this house this house where the chupacabra sleeps we sleep with our eyes open in case he wakes we sleep in this house which always smells slightly of blood and smoke of wild things of anguish not anguish and hunger not hunger of remembrance always remembrance of vengeance desperately seeking to name itself something else we live we sleep we eat we love we make things in this house where the chupacabra lives this house guarded by the chupacabra

At the end of Cuicacalli, you include a keynote speech you gave at the Chicana Arts & Activism Symposium in late 2017. In that speech you have a line: “Our task is to remain human. To become neither monsters nor victims.” How do you think your book contributes to this daunting task?

When I first read this question, I thought, wow, that’s a big task and a big question. But in the end, it’s a very simple answer.

 That’s the contribution of every work of art I’ve ever loved or appreciated. It’s my hope every time I follow a line of poetry or spin a story into being or answer questions like these. The task, the contribution, the hope of all these things is to increase our capacity to remain human and to resist both monstrosity and victimhood. To say, this is my story and this is where I am and this is how I feel and what do you think and what is your story and where are you and how do you feel and where do we understand each other? I don’t mean human in a simple way. I mean human as beings capable of compassion and understanding and justice and fairness. Of beauty and love and healing and vision.

What I hope for with this book is the same thing I will hope for with all my work—that it reaches whoever needs it. That it inspires a conversation. That it makes someone feel less alone. That someone understands it as a story of some ways I held on to remaining human.

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

Invocation to Daughters by Barbara Jane Reyes

Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky by David Bowles

Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe

Buckskin Cocaine by Erika Wurth

Ceremony of Sand by Rodney Gomez

Some Rogue Agent fans are just beginning to explore what making art about the body would look like for them. What advice would you give to someone just starting down the path toward writing poetry that features the body?

Right now, my first answer would be to say, “Listen.” We hardly ever listen to our bodies. Mostly, we are taught to deny our bodies and what they tell us they feel, they want, they need. We’re taught they don’t tell us anything. We’re taught to deny what our bodies know.

We’re not sure, really, what our bodies even are. The physical body isn’t all there is to a body. A body—a person—is the heart/soul/mind/body. A body is an energetic thing. We are our bodies, our heartsoulmindbodies. And we are also the concentric, overlapping, layered bodies that create who we are. A family is a body. A relationship is a body. Our artistic/political/cultural communities are bodies. Our histories, our realities, our dreams inform the location and specificity and nature of our bodies. Our relationship to nature is a body.

So, in writing about a community, we are still speaking of a body and speaking from a body. Same rules apply: listen and tell the truth. 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ire’ne lara silva stands by a window that looks out on the tree-lined street beyond. She has a round face, curly dark hair, brown eyes, and tan skin. She wears a black shirt with patterns of green palm leaves and red flowers. The buildings on the street are very modern with large square windows, black metal and concrete pillars.

Joylanda Jamison

THE SEASONS OF PMDD

Dry leaves scatter down an empty sidewalk. Leaf points turning end over end over end until their progression is halted—a soggy heap lodged in a gutter. What can be accomplished by holding back tears? Soon those leaves will become encased in a thin sheet of ice and the tiniest pressure will cause any numbness to break. Like jagged shards of glass splitting open the skin. Icy tears that run down cheeks over an untouched cup of coffee and the empty chair that accompanies a lonely body. Nestled only by the fire that flickers and crackles and pops within the confines of a fireplace. Misplaced heat doesn’t comfort but burns fiercely, unguided, uncontrollable. The littlest spark of lightning—lost keys, stubbed toe, overdraft fees, the presence of a loved one—can cause the most apathetic land to burn bright with flame. And the tongue is a flame of fire. Licking at the roots of trees, dismantling their foundations. Charred bones and cracked lips where lush conversation used to flourish. tears fall. steam rising from the ashes.

Little white pills chug
down my throat, there is no spring…
there is no relief.

Sarah Lilius

FEAR BONE

I close the dresser drawer
with my foot, sixth grade
under my tongue, twelve
years old in the bones.
The patella, left leg,
shifts, earthquake
of my body. 

This time, the bone
doesn’t go back, the land
moves as panic,
I feel it now, hot face,
breath leaves me
but stays too long,
constant fear, across.

Hospital dragon,
cherry red lights bleed
into my bedroom window,
a warning on fire.
Quivering memory,
men in uniforms
with empty needles
and full questions.

I picture a warehouse
where I’m in trouble.
Coldest air doesn’t
rotate, I can’t recall
how it went back
into the right groove.
It did though, I balance.

Cindy Veach

IN WHICH I SUBMIT TO THE MACHINE

The scan, in which they check up on my post
menopausal bones—the amount of mineral density
in the lumbar spine, left hip, right hip
as if I’m some kind of deeply dug, excavated, exhausted,
robbed of riches mine about to calve its scaffolding—
is painless. The best kind of test to have
to have. Like me, the machine is silent
and white. It glides over my body
without touching my body—a benevolent
hand assessing my aging ramparts.
I do my part. Lie exactly as instructed.
Lie still. Lie hands at my sides. Lie
like the good girl I am—knees up
on the Plexiglas block, ankles turned
out, tied in place, tight, but not too tight.

Kate Wright

TO OLD LOVERS
According to my Pop, when Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear, he mailed it, in a box, to his ex-girlfriend so, the two things that caused him the most pain in life could be together.

A baby tooth for the boy who left me
when I moved across states,
too fast to find a girl not so far.
You’ll be replaced soon
scribbled on a note card, tooth
haphazardly held, scotch tape
dulling its shine, dropped
into an envelope, sealed.

A molar half-gone, cavity cutting
down the middle, rings of tan,
brown, black. You’re rotten
to the boy with perfect,
white teeth, who couldn’t stop
lies from escaping them.

Another tooth with a small brown spot
at the corner, lost before it blossomed
into something more, for the boy
met through mutual friends
who grew to despise our alcohol-dependent,
late-night, rebound relationship:
You were starting to eat away at me.
We grew tired of it too.

Finally, four wisdom teeth,
sliced and ripped raw, freed
from jaw and gum, all packaged
and prepped for the boy who tried
so hard to stay, so long until:
I had to cut you
out, you were giving me nothing
but pain.

Brynn Martin

IN DAYDREAMS I VIOLENCE MYSELF A NEW BODY

A tab of skin has come loose
on my left forefinger
so I tug it, thinking to slough
off a small strip of dead skin.
Instead, I keep peeling,
the thin top layer separates
from the rest with a satisfying shhsckt.
I have a whole sheet
the size of my hand,
translucent and pale,
but still I pull, entranced
by how it won’t crack, break
or stop. The skin peels
even past the kink of my wrist,
keeps up the shucking sound,
though is louder now and wide.
The strip is as long as my arm
but I can’t stop pulling.
Everything stings as I peel
the sheet further, down my shoulder,
across my chest    my whole torso.
I need to see  how much skin
will come off   this time,
what I    will look like  underneath.
It ends                  at my toe
I am transfixed    by the pounds

of cells           I have stripped from myself,
a heap             of shed          skin.

I barely notice                                               what is left—

my body        pink        raw

burning.

Issue 49 Contributors

Frances Boyle is the author of two poetry books: Light-carved Passages(2014) and This White Nest (forthcoming 2019), and a novella, Tower(2018). Her writing has won local and national awards in Canada, and appeared in many print and online publications, most recently The New Quarterly, Ottawater, The Anti-Languorous Project, Literary Review of Canada, Harbor Review, Barren and untethered. She lives in Ottawa, where she helps edit Arc Poetry Magazine. Her website is www.francesboyle.com .

Joylanda Jamison currently resides in Virginia with her blind cat, Stevie, and non-blind cat, Blackjack. She is pursuing her MFA through Lindenwood University and has had her poems featured in Lamp. Follow her on Instagram @itsjoylanda for more poetry.

Sarah Lilius is the author of four chapbooks, including GIRL (dancing girl press, 2017), and Thirsty Bones (Blood Pudding Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Entropy, and other places. She lives in Virginia with her husband and sons. Her website is sarahlilius.com.

Brynn Martin is a Kansas native living in Knoxville, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She now works as the Literary Arts Director for Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Contrary Magazine, Yes, Poetry, and Crab Orchard Review.   

Jillian M. Phillips lives & writes in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, though she still maintains her New England accent. She holds an MFA in Writing from the  University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge, Nonbinary Review, The Manifest Station, other publications, and forgotten boxes in her mother's basement. 

Louisa Schnaithmann is a poet living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work has previously been published in the Ursinus College literary magazine, The Lantern.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013) which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire'ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci.  Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, will be published by Saddle Road in April 2019. Website: irenelarasilva.wordpress.com

Cindy Veach is the author of Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. She is the co-poetry editor of The Mom Egg Review.

Sara Moore Wagner is the Cincinnati based author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Glass poetry journal, Gulf Stream, Gigantic Sequins, Stirring, and Arsenic Lobster, among others, and is forthcoming in journals including Western Humanities Review, Harpur Palate, and Tar River Poetry. She has been nominated for a Pushcart prize, and for Best of the Net. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com. 

Ferral Wilcox is a U.S. born poet and musician currently living in Pokhara, Nepal. Ferral's work can be found or is forthcoming in Per Contra, concise, Peacock Journal, Willawaw Journal, SWWIM, Rat's Ass Review and elsewhere. Her poetry was featured in the Q-Street venue of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and she is a regular contributor to the Plath Poetry Project.

Kate Wright graduated from Penn State's BA/MA program in English and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Up the Staircase Quarterly, Sport Literate, Ghost City Review, Rust + Moth, Columbia College Literary Review, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @KateWrightPoet .