RogueAgent

ISSUE 68
CONTENTS

NOVEMBER 2020

Joan Kwon Glass
Sara Kearns
Kent Leatham
Stephen Kuusisto & Ralph James Savarese
Joshua Garcia
Sheila Dong
Cavar
Dianna Vagianos Armentrout
Kathryn Paul
Danae Younge

CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Kwon Glass

CLEAN

she liked to polish//the kitchen counter//until the white Formica gleamed//
her face back up at her seeing herself//she rubbed harder
—Sarah Freligh, “Woman’s Work”

1982, Daegu, South Korea
as children in Korea we visited the hot springs,
bathed naked alongside our mother and grandmother,
soaked our skin until we could no longer stand it,
then climbed atop tables and endured the ajumas’
brutal scrubbing of our tender bodies, neck to toes.
as the grime rolled off, we emerged pink and new,
dizzy from the steam and proud we had not cried. 
it felt like we should no longer recognize ourselves.
we did not yet understand that there is never
enough scrubbing for that.

2017, Clawson, Michigan
before she drove to the hotel that night to take her life,
my sister left her home immaculate.  every surface gleamed
and shone, as though she had tried to cover up
evidence of a crime.  when I walked in for the first time
after her death, when I fell to my knees and wept,
when it sunk in that she was gone, the air was filled
not with the scent of her perfume or her last meal,
but of Pine Sol.

2020, Milford, Connecticut
in my home, even the dust is alive.
it gathers and twirls beneath the fan,
just happy to exist.  sometimes it hops
from here to there. it does not hesitate or apologize
or notice that I am watching it warily.
soon, the room is filled with my children,
with their noise and their way of taking up space
without wondering if they should.
I lose track of the dust bunny,
but not before I give it a name and promise
to let it be, to just let it be.

Sara Kearns

INSIDE LIKE A FALLING SKY

The inside of my body is a falling sky,
black-eyed clouds and red weather.
The surgeon says that if I give the right answers,
he’ll remove the thunder.
Everyday there is less buoy.
I’ll soon go under into the blind green hum.

But this morning the air is clean,
as if I could drink it with a mint leaf,
and despite the body’s overhead clapping,
I hear birdsong that sweeps through the trees.

Kent Leatham

THERAPY

Don’t worry, I’m not going to show you my penis
in this poem. Not without consent, at least. 

“Sweet potatoes have a thick, difficult-to-remove skin
that makes them frustrating to work with.

Not like when I was two months old
and a stranger took it out without permission, 

Wash the sweet potatoes under running water to remove excess dirt.
Place the sweet potatoes in a pot and cover them with water. 

held me down, cut me apart.
My mother says I didn’t cry, though I assume

Place the covered pot on the stove over high heat.
Bring the sweet potatoes to a boil. 

my silence was a result of shock.
She says I can’t possibly remember it anyway, 

After about ten minutes, when the sweet potatoes have softened,
remove the lid and puncture them with a sharp paring knife
to hasten the cooking process.

piece or pierce, from so young an age,
and she’s right. I don’t remember. I’m reminded. 

Finish cooking for another twenty minutes, or until tender.
The boiling process causes the skin to easily detach from the sweet potato.

Every time I take it out to pee, I see
the scar’s ghost, the pointless exposure. 

A sweet potato is done when you can drive
a knife straight through it without resistance.

But don’t worry, I’m not going to let you peek,
no matter how many times you ask me   

Slice into the sweet potato's skin, using the paring knife.
Peel off the skin, similar to the way you would peel a banana.

how it makes me feel or why I think I might have trust
issues regarding my mother’s failing memory. 

Alternatively, cut off the sweet potato's tip
and scrape off the skin, using your knife.”

I mean, you’re some kind of doctor, right? I swore I’d
never let a doctor down that far again. 

(“How to Boil a Sweet Potato and Remove the Skin”
by Maya Black)

Stephen Kuusisto & Ralph James Savarese

In the spirit of William Stafford and Marvin Bell’s 1983 book Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry, we have written a book called Someone Falls Overboard: Talking in Poems. There were just two rules for the poetic exchange: 1) 16-line poems (an extra line is permissible) and 2) each poem must respond in some way to the one that precedes it. As Bell writes in Segues, “I pinch off/ a part of the story I know;/toss it to you.”

FROM A LECTURE (SK)

Skaldic verse, allusions to mythology,
Numerous fragments of tales,
Lists of alternative poetic terms
For a wide range of things,
Including supernatural entities
(such as the many names of Odin).
But I say doctors also,
Thor’s servants
With this hammer
And that bellows,
A draft of leaden malt,
Pretending they can
Lift your dying friend
Atop the piled stones,
Ringing the doctor bells,
Poking fingers into smoke...

ONCE WHEN I WAS DRUNK (RJS)

Lose some weight if you
want me to lift you.
I will do the same.
Even in grief, a bad
back is a bad back.
As a child I thought Ben
Gay was Ben Hur—
chariots and muscles,
each of them pulled….
Once when I was drunk,
I reached for a tube
and brushed my teeth.
Gums were gladiators
and my mouth the Coliseum.
Let us both say a prayer
for fallen warriors.

Joshua Garcia

YOUR BODY LIKE MINE

stank at the end of long, hot days
and must have stirred at the sight of certain bright bodies. 
You, too, fell ill and, as your fevers broke, whimpered, 
shiny and writhing as an exiled fish. I run 
palms down goosebumped skin in the cold
of naked mornings and wonder, 
Do I animate hunger in the stomachs of men?
Will some morning I be collected by the handful 
and brought to a prayerful tongue to trace away my imperfections?
Surely you looked in awe at the machinations 
of your flesh and wondered how and if 
someone would someday receive you.
Did you know then what would become of the body 
that opened for you to experience this world?
Of the arms and legs and buttocks that moved you through it?
The neck that turned. The ears that heard. 
The muscles that tightened after hard work 
and which would be stretched to the point of becoming 
a door. Your chest, like mine, emptied 
at the not-knowing. Or did you know? It is said you knew 
the temptations, the blemishes, the pain of men. 
But did you know the joys too? The sweet rush 
of the ocean’s pull, the breath of flowers mingling, 
the knot in your chest undone. Could you feel, then, 
the whispering thirst in our mouths as we cross 
forehead and lip and breast, weaving for ourselves a veil
that you might lift?

Sheila Dong

LULLABY

in a phlebotomist’s office, a small machine gently / rocked vials of blood back and forth / a blood cradle / rocking erythrocytes to sleep / like they were scared / being without a body and needful / of comforting / little motherless cells / shh shh / shh went the cradle / metal parts swinging seamlessly / later the blood would be interrogated / made to tattle on my shortcomings / it was the winter i was alone / maybe the machine mimicked / the rhythm of my walking, the push / of my heart / i knew nothing / about phlebotomy or being / on my own / the snow blew down / the cradle shushed and shushed into the night

Cavar

WAYS 2MAKE 18

dark. Brown hair. Mine
short. Silence  small mums
our between. Us has been
in truth is still us. 6 dim hrs
black ago. We empty. Still
she cannot find     the body.
I let her look. Let her long
for someone 2 make sense
of sex. Light blinks stories 
up. The blinds. 3 cups. Cots
empty bed. Try till 2. I am
afterward I am not allowed
afterward to kiss. Into this
silence. Inside the it is dark.

Dianna Vagianos Armentrout

ARTEMIS BRUISES MY BELLY WITH HER ACUPUNCTURE NEEDLE
being purple is very serious
—Alice Notley

Above my belly button
       below the   /   scar
Bella Luna clawed into me
a purple flower deepens under my breasts
dark and fierce like love
    strong this purple of irises
         of lilacs

I wear you Purple like armor
     protect me from viruses and terror
             unnecessary words

Needle to nerve,
Do you feel that? she asks
I say  yes,  as she listens to bugs
   in my pulse and gazes
      at my trembling geographic
tongue

Kathryn Paul

MY HEART IS NOT A COPPER POT

My mother is not a four-poster bed,
nor a china cupboard, nor an antique
breakfront with a missing
cut glass drawer-pull that prism’d
across the hallway to waltz
with the chandelier’s crystal

teardrops. Nor am I her string
tugged upon any longer,
nor the recipient of twinned
linen dresses, psyches entwined,
suffocating sure as morning-
glory tendrils choke the tea roses
climbing up the wallpaper, tearing the arbor
from its mooring above the screen porch.

I am not this perfectly framed
portrait. My mother is not
that Shaker paintbox with its faint
odor of turpentine. This scarlet stain
is merely the memory of a rupture.

Nothing is bleeding
and only one of us is
dead.

Danae Younge

SPEEDBOAT RIDE

At the intersection
of two wakes,
my own effervesces
off the stern,
the other frothing silence
underneath my great aunt’s
parched upholsteries
somewhere in a New York strip,
crashing through
the distant carpet’s pile.

At the crossing
of a life line wrapped
upon itself like ribbon,
the water aerates
into an ivory mirror - 
reflects lips that
peel corn husks,
wilted eyes and wind
creasing flabs of skin
like curled caterpillars.  

As if sun surging 
from the fiberglass skyline
blows gusts on her grays,
her body accelerating
to freedom.

Issue 68 Contributors

Dianna Vagianos Armentrout is a writer, teacher and workshop facilitator. Her memoir Walking the Labyrinth of My Heart: A Journey of Pregnancy, Grief and Newborn Death was published in 2016. Dianna’s writing appears in The Vermont Literary Review, The Connecticut Review, Melusine or Women in the 21st century, and Inkwell among others. She is finishing her novel about her female Greek ancestors, and is seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection. She blogs at www.diannavagianos.com. 

Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. Author of two chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press, 2020) and THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit, TBD), they have also had work featured in Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. Cavar navel-gazes at sarahcavar.wordpress.com and tweets @cavarsarah.

Sheila Dong lives in Tucson, AZ. Their writing has appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Old Pal, Arcturus, Moonsick Magazine, and other places. Sheila's chapbook Moon Crumbs was published in 2019 with Bottlecap Press. In their spare time, Sheila reads poetry for Random Sample Review, watches too much television, and collects examples of oddly specific or otherwise humorous closed captions.

Joshua Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston and is an editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hobart, The Shore, Homology Lit, and elsewhere.  

Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial Korean American who grew up in Seoul, South Korea and in Michigan. She teaches and writes near New Haven, CT. Her poems have recently been published or are upcoming in Rust & Moth, Rattle, SWWIM, Rogue Agent, South Florida Poetry Journal, Persephone’s Daughters, West Trestle Review, The Mantle Poetry Journal, Wondrous Real and others. Her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Joan tweets @joanpglass and you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.

Sara Kearns is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, Incisor, from Finishing Line Press. She has been a runner-up for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and has been a finalist for the New Issues First Book Award and Boulevard’s Emerging Poet Contest. Her work has most recently been published in DMQ Review and Scrawl. She teaches in Pittsburgh and makes polls for IMDb. 

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of three books of prose, Planet of the Blind, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, and Have Dog, Will Travel, and three books of poetry, Only Bread, Only Light, Letters to Borges, and Old Horse, What is to be Done? He teaches at Syracuse University.

Kent Leatham’s poems and translations have appeared in dozens of journals in the U.S. and abroad, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly, as well as in two anthologies of COVID-19 literature from Iō Literary Journal and Fearsome Critters. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University. He currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay. He is pansexual.

Kathryn Paul lives in Albuquerque, NM. She is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Her poems have appeared in Ekphrasis, Hospital Drive, The Ekphrastic Review, Lunch Ticket, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Words Dance, and Poets Unite! The LiTFUSE @10 Anthology.

Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly, and two books of poetry, Republican Fathers and When This Is Over. He teaches at Grinnell College.

Danae Younge is a young-adult, biracial writer who specializes in poetry and flash fiction. She was one of 25 national winners selected by the Live Poets Society of New Jersey to be featured in Just Poetry!!! Literary Magazine and was awarded third place in the It’s All Write international writing competition. Her work is also published in Vita Brevis Press, Palette Point Magazine, and others,. You can find more of Danae's writing at www.danaeyounge.com and follow her on instagram @danae_celeste_.