RogueAgent

ISSUE 45
CONTENTS

DECEMBER 2018


E Kristin Anderson
Clyde Kessler
Nasreen Khan
Meg Yardley
Shivangi Sandhu
INTERVIEW: Willa Carroll
Agnes Hanying Ong
Christian Sammartino
Brian Clements
John Paul Martinez
Mary Jo Firth Gillett

CONTRIBUTORS

E Kristin Anderson

BAD ENOUGH, SIMPLE LUCK

This is an erasure poem. Source material: King, Stephen. Dolores Claiborne. New York: Pocket, 1993. 130-139. Print.

TEXT DESCRIPTION:

scared, I finally took my head
a woman
cherry underfoot
the time God was no help
fourteen hours a day and gone
kisses akin to a hatchet, cold
possessions and hours—you understand I need to wonder
my had had the most
glass in teh afternoon, outside
let go in bruises
talking about my bad girl heart
struck louder in the mouth, eyes out
suicide clearer inside me, driven until that animal saw a daughter in a daydream
hand on fault
honey inside as find as milk
American in bluejeans
murder in my magic

Clyde Kessler

A BEE IN THE AMBER

Out-buzzed, I played a bee dawdling inside amber,
the resin of a jungle saddled my wings. Starlight
grinned through all my eyes, so there was this heaven
ready to be the stone that I lived inside, in-buzzed
where the breathing and the heart-beating made echoes
tangle my feet. I saw the small, red orchid and yellow leaf
fondling a hummingbird, helping the air it worshipped
taste like a trillion sugars pushing down its throat.

Buzzed away, I know what I feel. It is this gumtree fossil
and this slow paleontologist, that dark pair of eyes in a lens,
and the lens is planted deep into my name, and I’m nameless.
I feel the honeysuckle laughing. I feel the empty hives
framed like islands in a bear’s dreams. Oh, the sun is burnt
into palm trees. Clouds breathe across Haiti. Ghost crabs
slip from their holes in the sand. I feel their stalky eyes
preaching to the light of God. I know where my home is.

Nasreen Khan

HUNGRY

I am getting fat
here
in the breadbasket of the world.

I am growing sluggish here
and I lift my head
bovine and ruminant, chewing the same
cud
as every other cocksucker out there. 

The white scars of my brown skin fading into let’s all get along
post-colonial complacency
fading, like
the memory of Hunger.

How have I forgotten to stay hungry?

I came from hungry
parents, who were birthed from hungry parents, who
had hungry parents, who climbed up out of
a hungry earth, who was spat from  

the cunt of a
hungry god
who is a hungry woman

with the lust of famine in her eyes
and ribs protruding below her low, big-nippled breasts,
who never died on a cross but lives and lives and lives
on the edge of sacred starvation
forever and ever

Meg Yardley

CITÉ UNIVERSITAIRE, GENÉVE, 1999

My marionette arms, my marionette legs, all bone:
Terpsichore has gone home.

A flash: my doppelgänger’s gleaming arms
across the room. I wrestled her down

last night in my sleep, but forgot
to wring a blessing from her moon-white throat.

            These things only will be granted:
           Cards scattered on the floor, the blond King face up.
A listener. A blue sky in the afternoon
when I wake up wooden.

A man with drunk eyes seizes my arm:
“Give me one good reason why not.”

My deciduous body dies a new death each day,
how’s that?

Every night I sink,
every morning I’m still swimming.

Shivangi Sandhu

THE 70TH DAY

It has been a while since my parents haven’t been back.

They say people have been dying out there.

Is it true that you need a piece of paper to make your existence valid?
is it true that you need a paper to leave this land?

(Syria)

I thought we were going someplace,

on the 10th day.

Where are we?

‘Your colour is not right’

‘Your gender seems to be too feminine’

(Congo)

The 20th day I wanted people to understand.

To look at kindness and not skins.

Even if we were not kind enough,

I wanted to let it go.

(Orlando)

‘Do you have it?’

‘The paper’

‘Something used to exchange with things’

money?

‘But do you have it?’

‘No’.

(Malawi)

The 35th day I fell on my knees

I hurt my knees a little

They are bleeding.
But its alright.

Happens in my race.

(Afghanistan)

The 50th day I heard gunshots.

They don’t stop now.

They seem to be chasing me.

To my dreams at times.
What do I do?

(Turkey)

55th day I call for god.

He isn’t returning my calls.

(Norway)

57th day I try again.

He says no

(America)

The 65th day my guts feel sick.
I think I have a disease.

Its reaching my heart now.

My sinful heart.

The 68th day I get a call,

‘Who is it?’, I ask with weakness in my voice.  

The 70th day I get a call again.
‘Revolution’, a voice says.

‘What took you so long?’, I asked.
‘Gathering guts takes some time’

Willa Carroll talks about embodied poetry
and writing Nerve Chorus

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 began writing at a very young age, drawn to the sonic qualities of words, and increasingly came to regard the body as both the source and instrument of language. I spent much of my youth, as well as my first decade in NYC, performing in experimental dance and theater, while also writing poems. These forms, for me, are linked. As Robert Pinsky asserts: “The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.”

An injury ended my dance career and the loss of that identity was like a death, a painful shedding of a familiar self. Yet my experience became a resonant source for my first book. The title of my first collection, Nerve Chorus, refers to motor cells firing together in concert. The phrase came to me while reading an anatomy textbook. The title became a call to action, a directive to make poems visceral and haptic at the level of language, and kinetic on the page.

As the manuscript evolved, I grew more concerned with the relationship of the body to notions of power and agency. The book spotlights body, self, family, and society while interrogating brutal inequalities. The poems take on gender, class, race, war, gun violence, and capitalistic greed. Some of the poems deal with sexual violation and the reclaiming of power in the aftermath. Others document and grapple with my father’s fatal asbestos exposure before the known risks became public knowledge. The physical labor of my father’s work as a carpenter, which cost him his life, came to inform the book as much as my experience as a performer. 

Nerve Chorus opens with an imperative: “Zero my origins....Zero the refrain....” How is the concept of zero, nothingness, and undoing central to the book, especially as it concerns the body?

In the book, many of the poems rely on repetition to create emotional intensity and kinetic momentum. This chorusing impulse is countered by the concept of zero, undoing, or negation, enacted as an equal and opposite force. Verbs of erasure, often deployed in imperative strokes, function as a subtractive strategy. Embedded in these poems is the wish to remove suffering and injustice, as in the lines: “Cut the asbestos from my father’s work clothes, / minus this dust from his lungs.”  

I think of “Chorus of Omissions” and “Chorus of Excisions,” as catalogues of willed disappearances. These poems, and others, such as “I Didn’t Have the Nerve to Say No,” which is borrowed from a Blondie song, have political weight for me. The power to deny, remove, draw boundaries, or simply say no, is perpetually denied to women and marginalized communities.

The word “zero” recurs throughout out the book, bringing the associations of nothingness, or conversely, completeness. The third section has an elegy titled “River of Zero,” and the book’s final poem is built around the elegiac phrase “we betroth to zero,” which connects back to the opening imperative of “Zero my origins.” These poems attempt to reach beyond binaries of living and dying, being and non-being.

My parents met at one of the first Zen Buddhist Centers in North America and I grew up with Buddhist teachings on impermanence, emptiness, and interdependence. As a child I heard my father talking of the “wheel of birth, death, and rebirth.” I continue to investigate the influences of these views on my embodied writing practice.

CHORUS OF OMISSIONS

Zero my origins of industrial winter,
my mug-shot of smoke.
Zero our factories, Kodak gone bankrupt.
Omit gloved hands in glinting chemical vats,
minus equations & patents.
Erase your pixelated face, mouth of wet vowels.
Cut the asbestos from my father’s work clothes,
minus this dust from his lungs.
Erase chalk outlines, K-9s, riots, & memory lines in my
rust-belt revival city,
heat-packing city,
suffragette city,
abolitionist city.
Erase tracks of the Underground Railroad at 25 Main
where Frederick Douglass inked
The North Star.
Cut cuffs from a radical in black taffeta,
our Susan B. Anthony arrest at the ballot.
Cut skin / state / cotton / lace.
Cut the water after the bread
& sugar skulls for the dead.
Zero the serial killer who lived at Hotel Cadillac,
moved near our old school,
delivered girls to the river.
Cut throat / slip tongue / wring neck / skin teeth.
Cut new glass for the voids
in my father’s jacked Ford.
Omit us, protest kids in the concrete forest, chanting:
No Blood for Oil!
Cut our school sentry named Flash,
a scar across his throat,
rasping his commands at the door
with walkie-talkie in one hand,
my brother in the other.
Cut class under the overpass.
Cut my cracker-jack-ass.
Erase purchase of dime-bag at the Drive-Thru.
Omit the jingle, I’d rather be in Rochester, It’s got it!
Refrain my ex, of the high IQ, from doing junk at breakfast,
overloading his blood,
going cold at noon.
Omit twilight inside a blue glass jar,
minus a confetti of stars,
zero the moon Xeroxed on a pond,
undulant ghost on dark water.
Cut film to shreds, zero the Kodachrome,
insert megapixels & code like bright seeds.
Omit this pilgrimage back to my old room,
minus shrines of memorabilia,
minus all pre-digital selves.
Refrain from recollecting your lips, our collisions in bed,
tiny gongs in my nerves,
tidal waves of apples.
Zero the refrain, minus the song.

Just as important as the concept of nothingness and deletion, the concept of legacies and inheritances weaves throughout the book. For example, the last line of the poem “Mesothelioma” changes the disease from something suffered solely by the father to something gifted, in a way, to the speaker. (“I costumed myself in his work clothes.”) In the poem “Green Room” the speaker is forging connections with her parents before she is even born (“I’m in the green room, painting it black.”) How is it possible that these two seemingly opposite realities of connection and the undoing of connection exist aside one another in the book? 

The relationship between connection and loss is a fulcrum for the book. Mesothelioma is a brutal and aggressive cancer, resulting from asbestos exposure, and watching my father succumb to it was devastating The experience brought the ephemerality of being alive into focus, and this was its own strange gift. The troubling legacy of the line you quoted relates to the risk for family members of those who have been exposed to asbestos. Crushed or airborne asbestos fibers can be carried on hair and clothes and can pose a danger in the home.

The lines you quoted from “Green Room” connect to my fascination with origins and interdependence. What of us exists in our parents before we’re born? What of the iron in our blood that’s sourced from dead stars? In a related poem, I make reference to a Zen koan that asks, “Show me your face before the birth of your parents.” Koans spur the mind beyond the dualistic, conceptual, and discursive. And poetry moves us beyond limited ways of perceiving and thinking, opening liminal zones of possibility.

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

In order to narrow down the choices, I’m selecting books released in 2017 and 2018:

Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith

The Carrying, Ada Limón 

Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith,

All They Will Call You, Tim Z. Hernandez 

Luminous Debris, Timothy Liu

River Mouth, Heather Dobbins 

Holdfast, Christian Anton Gerard

Troubler, Elijah Burrell

Aftermath, Thomas March

Orintheology, Kevin McLellan

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?

Trust yourself as much as possible; the page is a refuge. Hold nothing back in your writing; being uncomfortable is often a sign of fertile territory and writing with bravery. Be voracious in your reading and learn from imitating what interests you. Follow any curiosity about other forms of art and other fields for source material. Remain aware that writing from the body often brings up shame, especially if you’re alchemizing trauma, pain, or illness. Tune into the intelligence of the body and honor it as a collaborative partner. Read your work aloud after each draft and pay attention to sound, rhythm, and breath. When you perform your work, feel your feet on the ground, the air vibrating in your thorax, as the poem moves in your body, and your body in the poem.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Willa Carroll gazes at the viewer through a window. She has long blonde hair and light eyes. She wears a black cowboy hat and a brown shirt with a black pattern.

Agnes Hanying Ong

STRAIGHT SEXUAL SCRIPT: MUSCLING GOD

into the heart of the city
a neopuritan man lifts his hands

up to reach the pull-up machine,
which i sometimes use as a pulldown

machine for salvation from what
an anthropologist once described to me

as the inevitable curse of bipedal homo erectus
down at the arcade, i decide to walk into a sports 

equipment shop, thanking eve for having decided to
grow up, make her own decision and eat the fruit

of the tree of knowledge of goof and evil. good and evil,
also goof and evil. if she hadn’t done that, we would

probably still just be crawling around, with less back pain,
religiously popping out fellow crawlers, with less labor pain.

a non-neopuritan man tending the store approaches me,
asks if i needed anything. yes, i say, i am looking for

a dumbbell. he leads me to stacks of dumbbells in
the corner of the store. one stack consists of bare 

steel dumbbells, the other of the ones coated with rubber.
the bare ones are double the price of the coated ones.

i pick a coated one, livestock-branded “12 lb.” at home,
i set it down on my twin bed that has its own precious

pheromones and lie down. with my lumbar region
on the dumbbell, i begin to squirm and writhe in

unholy ways as the thorns of postural sins pierce
the flesh deeper, sink into the yet un-exorcisable

bones and blood just right underneath. i feel like
st. benedict, said to have gone around rolling 

in rose bushes to discipline the flesh. good
people, straight eyes, catch me ridin’ dirty.

Christian Sammartino

I CUT THE SONG OF MYSELF OUT OF MYSELF
after Walt Whitman

           Used the knife I found in blades of grass
on Boston Common to make a space
           within myself, like a child gutting
a pumpkin, carving a space in the belly

until there is room for a candle
and there is no more boy, just a jack-o’-lantern
           illuminating the symbols for horror
in the Halloween of my mind.

            Post mortem of youth, haunted house          
in my head that distorted my mind

            until it was a soundtrack of party screams
the gory kind your neighbor plays on his boombox to terrify
            trick-or-treating children—but there are no party tricks,
no vampire teeth, no fake blood, no costumes to disguise

            those bodies in the caskets of the funeral parlor
draped in their palls—those are the people I loved,
            the ones who reassured me I wasn't an alien.
The ones who stayed out past curfew

            with me on mischief night, phoned E.T at home
to ask if love is an intergalactic myth.
            They all got called home to the mother ship
and I don’t own a bicycle that can fly to heaven.

            I still sing their eulogies everywhere—

over the percussion of 21 gun salutes,
            above priests reading from the gospels,
Even over the T driver announcing my stop.

I cut the song of myself out of myself
            until I was no self.

I dumped my not self into Boston harbor,
            as if to say, no horror without representation,
no haunting without the promise of exorcism,
            no song without this blue blood on my palms.

                        This is no place for cowards.

            I cut the song of myself out of myself,
found all the stones of silence I put in my mouth,
            all the weight I used to hold my body down
until I acknowledge what PTSD did to me.

            How he snapped into psychosis,
recited his suicide note by the pond,
            threatened to murder his children.
I cut the song of myself out of myself.

           What I exhume you shall exhume
until we can celebrate our selves and not selves.
           All I want is to loaf in a space in my skull,
luxuriate in a silence so wholly naked,

I no longer see him wearing his death mask.

            I know I can't pull it off his face,
unmask the villain at the end of this episode,
            because this isn't Scooby Doo.
The mystery machine isn't coming.

Neither are the police or an ambulance.

            I cut the song of myself out of myself,
lugged it out of my electric body to locate
            the voice box I unplugged,
the one with the tape recording,

containing the boy’s last words
           before he took his vow of silence.

Brian Clements

NOTE TO FORMER SELF

Some time ago, your left wrist
turned over and revealed itself
my retractable clamp; your right
took the monk’s robe.
Your throat opened, and sparrows
nested below my jaw;
there my tongue flaps, two chicks.
When your eyes x-ed out,
I plugged flashbulbs into the sockets;
now my dreams strobe
like gunfire in the dark.
I feel you there wandering the Cartesian
Theater, bon voyageing your ears,
where headphones like an alien
transponder now play. These feet
of clay only resemble their past
incarnation as holdfast of a home;
those are stones that were
your knees, and of plywood
are your ankles made. The ark
of your belly—a shed where I put
everything I’d rather not say.
I’ve built a railroad where your shoulders were,
and, in place of your liver,
a spider’s nest. Your head swivels
on a surveyor’s compass, and at the center
of your chest, a bag of Epsom.
I have preserved all of these pieces
in the normal places where people have
their human things, so that someday,
when we’re over it all,
you can sit next to me in the dark
and put what is left of you
in the shape of a hand
into my 100% real-life,
warm and loving hand.

John Paul Martinez

ALL MY PARTS

are rainless
         darned together
         by craggy twine

my hair slung from knotting ivies
         one long piece kneaded
         in salt & matted fur 

sheared from placid mammals
         my heart a muddling
         of unripe rose hips

sweet & planktonic
         in which all night
         warm milk runs through

my hands are ringing
         they scatter adzuki beans
         across the tiling & I jingle

stones between my fingers
         roll them across
         my pinkened knuckles

along my body’s every inch
         a waking Nachlass
         collection of orphaned lines

         mass of perfect smithereens

Mary Jo Firth Gillett

APERTURE

Quirk of failing vision, misfire in the gray matter,
and the eye sees rain but reads ruin, the mind flailing
in a rogue wave of mismatched static gibberish,
the warring of eye and brain a skirmish, a warning
something’s amiss, error amassing, letters missing,
a wisp, a smolder ready to combust or else like mist
to quietly disperse, no longer lost in a maze of words,
letters jumbled or restrung to a lie, a lei of strange petals,
a strangle of orchid blooms about the neck—the blossoms
of a childhood orchard turned from tasty promises to
something different, fallen fruit seeping, stings
that fly on insistent wings—and so come the abrupt
slippages—from rapture to rupture, from sing to singe.

Issue 45 Contributors

Based in Austin, TX, E Kristin Anderson has been published widely in magazines. She’s also the author of nine chapbooks, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, 17 seventeen XVII and Behind, All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker.

Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus (The Word Works, September 2018). A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she was the winner of Narrative Magazine's Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly's TQ7 Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. Carroll holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. A former experimental dancer and actor, she has collaborated with numerous performers and artists, including text-based projects with her filmmaker husband. Video readings were featured in Narrative Outloud. She lives in New York City and can be found on the internet at www.willacarroll.com.

Brian Clements s the author or editor of over a dozen print and digital collections, most recently the anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press). He teaches at Western Connecticut State University. 

Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s poetry collection, Soluble Fish, won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press) and she's  also published four award-winning chapbooks. Mary Jo's poems have appeared in The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Green Mountains Review, Third Coast, and other journals as well as the Verse Daily website. She's won the N.Y. Open Voice Poetry Award and a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts.

Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. Several years ago they built an art studio and named it Towhee Hill. Last year Cedar Creek Press published his book Fiddling At Midnight's Farmhouse. Kendall illustrated the book.

Nasreen Khan grew up in West Africa and Indonesia and is new to Indy.  She  teaches college English for a living, and writes poetry to stay sane.  On a Friday night she can be found cooking various organ meats or chasing down a stellar mint julep.

John Paul Martinez is a Filipino-Canadian poet and holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for Best of the Net. His poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Figure 1, wildness, Matador Review, and elsewhere. You can locate him digitally at johnpaulmartinez.com.

Agnes Hanying Ong is an academic research assistant, a writer and an illustrator. Her poetry has recently appeared in Haikuniverse, Breadcrumbs Mag and Failed Haiku. She has written for small public relations firms, past and forthcoming print publication. In a parallel universe, she eats a burrito bowl every weekend. She is usually reading when she is not thinking of burrito bowls, with extra rice.

Christian Sammartino is the co-founder and Editor-In-Chief of Rising Phoenix Review. He studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University. He is a Library Communications Technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. His poetry is influenced by life in the Pennsylvania Rustbelt near his hometown of Coatesville. His work has appeared in magazines such as Ghost City Review, Voicemail Poems, and Yes, Poetry. His first chapbook, Keystones, was released by Rising Phoenix Press in December 2014. 

Shivangi Sandhu is nineteen and pursuing Political Science in Delhi University, and has been struggling at everything since two years except for poems. She says she has no value for critics or liberalists. She hasn’t been nominated for anything and likes to paint. Her work has appeared in college magazines and she has also recited some on particular occasions.

Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Hanging Loose, Rattle, the East Bay Review, AMP, the Peauxdunque Review, and SWWIM.