RogueAgent

ISSUE 88
CONTENTS

JULY 2022

Marcella Remund
Jen Frantz
Natalie Eleanor Patterson
Kei Vough Korede
Emily Hockaday
Elena Bentley
Liz Ahl
Melissa Strilecki
Sudhanshu Chopra
Julia Lisella

CONTRIBUTORS

Marcella Remund

ISCHEMIA THINKS SHE’S SO FUNNY

I sit at my desk typing letters when Ischemia,
mischievous angel of change, scissors my left hand

loose from the brain’s direction, then sits in the bay
window humming I’m So Lost Without You. 

My brain thinks STUDENTS. My untethered hand
flops out q-4-8-V-s. The room spins like a carnival ride.

I stand, teeter, my left foot forgets up from down.
Step, drag, step, drag, hugging the handrail, I make

my way downstairs. In the bathroom mirror, I check
for stroke signs: stick out my tongue, raise my arms,

try simple sentences: Touch your nose. Be here now. Help.
In the ER, Ischemia sits on a med cart swinging

her legs, making bunny ears behind the neurologist.
I’m too late to stop her, the doc says. She’s done

her work. For the next week, I learn to walk again,
move pegs from one side of a board to the other,

squeeze a rubber ball. Ischemia whispers
goo goo gha gha in my ear and flaps her arms

like a chicken behind the therapist. I’m telling you,
I hate that lousy angel, but you have to admit, she’s hilarious.

Jen Frantz

I HAVE A FEW QUESTIONS

Will this hurt?
Will this hurt like
eagles hurt?
Like missing
a flight?
Like a wet
birthday card?
Am I gorgeous?
Am I the moon’s
handsome dove?
The train running
early in our one
prairie town?
Please.
Will this hurt like
a boat’s library?
Or going to
the bank as
a child?
Will this hurt
like we know
it will—slowly
choking
the brain’s
good bird?
Will this hurt
like my light
going out and
the blinds shut
and my worried
dog and my dead
hermit crab and
the mind saying
well—to answer
your question,
I think the world
is satisfied.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson

COMING OF AGE

In my dream I see a field of cows,
newborns trussed for the slaughter
to sharpened pikes. 

Their knees have the boniness
of elbows, the trembling of hands. 
One has a pink bow in its dirty hair.
That one makes strawberry milk. 

The whole pasture. Who let
these girls out of the house? 
Where are their mothers? 

You and me, picnicking 
on the killing floor.

I lean into you and whisper
that we should make love.
Don’t you remember, you reply. 
We already tried that and you cried
the whole time. 

Finally, the stun
gun clicks.

Kei Vough Korede

RETURNING

At dawn, the train came to a halt.
You walked your body, heavy with denial & distance, upon the Brown face of the Earth.
Two girls with ponytails bounded out of nowhere in mirth— there, suddenly, like the spleen of
laughter, memories came back to you, unwhole, spun in a whorl of childhood.
Half drunk in the morning's glory—
You closed your eyes, inhaled the air that reduced you to a heavy moment of remembrance, an abysmal
into the closest kind of surrender, and fell at the feet of history.
You, this little patchwork of time.
You, this familiar stranger who has known the length of roads.
You, this recovered loss of Zion.
There's a bit of liquor to memories & it has led your feet, wobbly, to the gutters of your past, where
you are a child again.
Your father's voice, a whip raised against your mother's body.
Her body, a map of conflagrating histories burning with everything from the past.

Emily Hockaday

BODY AS NEURAL NETWORK

In the dark,
my changing appetite 
hollowed me out. I'm
a curled crescent. Where
does the night end
and do I begin? Particles fall
along a shaft of light
like bioluminescence
at the bottom of the ocean. 
I have looked all over 
the earth and tried to see 
the difference in matter.
I know the pain
is real. I say it aloud. 

Elena Bentley

SURGERY DAY CELEBRATION
Royal University Hospital
Saskatoon, SK – January 1991

Happy Birthday! I just turned three.
I celebrated with anesthesia, nurses,
the doctor, their eyes over me.
While I slept, they sliced open feet,
crooked, clubbed, they lengthened
and tightened, reformed. I was cast
from hip to toe in plaster, woke
in bed, permanently bent. Alone
until the rest of my party arrived
with gifts. Mom and Dad, look—
I was fixed.

Liz Ahl

POOL THERAPY

At ninety degrees, the pool’s therapeutic—
like massages are therapeutic when gloved
in particular formalities, in particular offices, 
and therefore covered by insurance, if you’ve got it.
This pool’s not echoing with marco polo, not at all
limpid or stimulating or frothing full of sirens
or mermaids. A staircase with two railings descends
into the aquamarine, and I take it step by step,
these ruined knees pressed down by this fat old body until
I’m all the way inside the chlorine-scented bath—
and buoyancy’s miracle welcomes my angry bones,
soothes them out of friction. The heat coaxes
a kind of release, as if steam could carry off
all that is stuck and stiff and swollen. For half an hour,
I step and bend as commanded, one side to the other,
then a few laps across the deep end, and finally,
back to the stairs. As I emerge, what was borne away
comes slamming back; a physical and maybe therapeutic cruelty
I forgot to brace for, steam turning to hot lead,
me somehow heavier than I was when I entered the waters.
Your body is your burden, the air asserts,
and I drag it, this waterlogged corpse rolled in a carpet,
back into the influence of my planet’s true gravity,
this old pain with its new name.

Melissa Strilecki

CONCEIT

We must choose eccentric over sad. Take up taxidermy, walk
our creatures on a leash. Like Dumas, demand yellow paper
for our poems. Admit: I don’t want to choke but I want
your hands on my throat. Bake you pumpkin pie. Sing you
lullabies. Carve ruby canyons in your thighs.
Salt taunts from these red blossoms. Dare I? We all
first swim in brine, so if I wade deep into footnotes
of salinity tables, I’m trying to live through drought.
Obsessed with latitude—the last metaphor you’ll abide—
we sail Capricorn to Cancer, triangulating sun, Earth,
and us. You count each day’s blisters, lancing blebs
from my shoulders. Life etched my skin; the lines break
inelegant—I do not function as a poem. What babel binds
your song? I’ll translate, line by balmy line. Should you go blind
still burdened by verse, I’ll transcribe your litany
of tropical birds, the Latin names are often gorgeous.

Sudhanshu Chopra

ON THE DAY FOLLOWING THE INTERRUPTED NIGHT’S SLEEP: A NOIR

Since nobody finds you dozing off at your desk,
you don’t get fired. In fact you might be up for a

big-leap promotion. Even though you feel kind of
high all day. The haze in your mind like cigarette

smoke that swells invites-only nightclubs. Inscrutable
doors guarded by bouncers large as lethargy, keepers

of subconscious slumber, warning the workplace
snide & snarl directed at you to beat it. A third light-

-receiving aperture opening in your forehead to do
the looking & the blinking so through the first two

you may dream up a video-game world with a three-
-eyed boy who shoots globes of power from between

his bushy brows, the bad guys run away at his sight,
stolen/snatched ornaments falling out of the bulge in

their pockets, as if beckoning him to their boss’s vacant
office, should he choose to follow the lambent trinket trail.

Julia Lisella

THE BELLY

Try not to look down as you climb him
at the plushy quality of the flesh
of the absence of muscle
at the curves and folds like some mass
of not yet kneaded dough.
Think torso, think ribcage, think
navel to the wall of your back.
Don’t breathe in like that when you
climb him.

Try not to count the folds
as you gyrate joyfully – look
at him – he’s
not looking down either – he’s
happy at his sight line – the still
firm breasts, the only midlife
miracle of your body.

Try to recall it has always been
like your mother’s belly
round and soft
even when you biked
centennials. No surprises here. The belly
is not lofty - it has been
asked a lot of these past 58 years.
It moans a little after restaurant dinners,
it argues with your size 8 jeans. It’s been
cramped in and cramped up
with adjacent
vibrations of menses and labor,
a non-union worker who must always
show up. 

It’s not the labor you’re thinking of though.
Don’t look down. Gravity pulling it
one way, love pulling it another.
Look at the droplets of sweat
in each unfolding crease
and when you roll away from him,
lay your back down,
watch the floppy skin stretch,
and the sweet salt -
the way the skin eats it,
the funny way belly
balloons and flattens.
Let the walls go,
let your arm swing across
his gray-haired chest.

Issue 88 Contributors

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017) as well as several chapbook-length works of poetry. Individual poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in New Verse News, Limp Wrist, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Able Muse, Lavender Review, and West Trestle Review. Her latest collection, A Case for Solace, is forthcoming in 2022 from Lily Poetry Review Books. She lives in New Hampshire.

Elena Bentley (she/her) is a disabled, bi, Métis/settler poet, writer, editor, and book reviewer from Saskatchewan, Canada. She is a Citizen of Métis Nation-Saskatchewan. She holds an MA in English from the University of Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in various journals and magazines such as Arc Poetry, The Malahat Review, Room Magazine, and PRISM international. You can find her @_elenabentley_.

Sudhanshu Chopra is a poet, wordsmith and pun-enthusiast. 31 and rootless, he is fascinated by nature and frustrated by its incomprehension. He wishes we had evolved better or not at all. It is the midway that causes Catch 22 situations, which are quite troubling, mentally and otherwise. He tweets at @artofdying_.

Jen Frantz is a college dropout from Ohio. Her poems have been published in Pinwheel and Sporklet and are forthcoming in Washington Square Review. She is currently a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she is poetry editor of The Iowa Review.

Emily Hockaday’s first full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, will be out with Cornerstone Press in September 2022. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Starting a Life, What We Love & Will Not Give Up, Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide, and Space on Earth. Her poems have appeared in a variety of print and online journals. You can find Emily on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com or @E_Hockaday.

Kei Vough Korede (he/they) is a bi/queer poet from Nigeria. A reader of poetry for Tyrian Ink Press, they have works published across journals including Agbowo, Ethel Zine, Rogue Agent, PANK magazine and elsewhere. He tweets humor @KayVough, and debauchery @brooklynjoybird.

Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized, and are forthcoming or appear in Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, Ocean State Review and others. She is a professor of English at Regis College, and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. Her newest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, was named a finalist in the Lauria/Frasca poetry prize and will be published by Bordighera Press in 2022.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a half-Cuban femme lesbian poet and editor from Georgia with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Salem College. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022), editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, Yes Poetry, and more. She is the assistant editor of Jacar Press and an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University.

Marcella Remund is from South Dakota, where she taught at the University of South Dakota. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. Her chapbook, The Sea is My Ugly Twin, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. Her first full-length collection, The Book of Crooked Prayer, was published by Finishing Line in 2020. Find more info and links to her books, at www.marcellaremund.com.

Melissa Strilecki has been recently published in Gordon Square Review, Faultline, Volume Poetry, and The Shore. She lives in Seattle and is working on her first novel.