RogueAgent

ISSUE 56
CONTENTS

NOVEMBER 2019


Steven Luria Ablon
Rachael Gay
Ann E. Wallace
Maura Alia Badji
Michele Sharpe
INTERVIEW: Tara Shea Burke
Jim Ferris
Jennifer Hancock
Jo Angela Edwins
Linda Lamenza
Holly Day

CONTRIBUTORS

Steve Ablon

PINS AND NEEDLES

My arms like
wet wings
of the hawks
circling at night
drip with sleep.

I lift them
in prayer
as my forefathers
did thousands
of years ago;

melting like
treacle, I feel
sensation return
as languorous
bubbles rising,

to the sky,
some oval,
some oblong,
skin, tendons,
muscles, alive

again, each
bubble like
my life eloping,
leaving behind
what remains.

Rachael Gay

OCTARINE

I insert myself into the middle of the swarm,
paint myself with streaks of raw honey,

decorate what is left of my hair with honeycomb,
a dusting of golden pollen on my shoulders.

Naming myself an offering,
a peasant's last handful of wheat chaff,

I throw myself at the woozy yellow jackets
joyously drunk on the fermented rot of honeycrisp.

I have always been drawn to the desolate,
the dying exhale, the rattle.

The flash of the sun goddesses mirror is
the only thing with the power to draw me from my isolation.

I go to the dustiest antique shops,
the unused parlor of plastic covered chairs reserved for guests who never come

to bottle their sweet neglect to wear at the darkest hour of the night
when I know none will dare to climb the rickety trellis

bleached heather gray in the winter sun.
This far north a we are refracted light;

only the smallest fraction of self visible to ourselves.
I beg every drugged insect named pest to sting my sweet flesh

pull out, and sting again.
Light up my nerve endings and paint me synesthetic.

I know there is more to me than this palette of
cyan, yellow, magenta, tar black

mixed over and over again.
I make contact with every plane in their compound eyes.

Already I know unseen colors rest behind them.
I throw arms wide to embrace the cones,

try to insert the rods between my own eyes into
the hollow where I keep the objects of every enviable creature.

Tell me there is more to me.

Ann E. Wallace

NINE

The bartender gave a final wipe
to the hotel bar, tucked stools
beneath tables.

We followed the signals,
rose, reluctant from hidden
loveseat, the others
now gone, one
by one, or in pairs,
minutes, maybe hours,
before, as the lounge din
melted into white noise
when your knee first pushed
warm against mine, then
again, the pressure
thigh to thigh electric
under cover of flirt
and laughter,
pulsing pulsing.

Alone at closing,
we pulled limb
from limb,
and slipped
toward the lift,
waiting, pulsing
still as it dropped,
perhaps brushed
fingers against fingers
in silence as we stood,
stepped in, said nine
in unison.

The rising heavy
and not long enough
in the hazy hour,
we stepped off
onto nine,
me, then you.

Paused, we
lifted eyes for a beat
in time with breath, 
bodies bound
by a current that pulled
in but not together
for one final pulse.

You stepped
to the right,
and I to the left,
our staccato charge
softening to a hum
as the space
between us grew.

Maura Alia Badji

LIVE AT THE FLAME

The stage lights’ embrace, bright and hot,
Feels like home after hours of cards in the back
Of the bus, too many Top & Bottoms to count.

My face takes on its own protective glow. I’m
Here but not here; my eyes close.  The music
And I have already entered each other, without

So much as a kiss. Though kisses will come
Later. Before, or after, more liquid loves have
Claimed my veins, had their way with me.

I can sense you now, out there in the smoky
Dark, lounging at some candlelit table. You sip
Champagne, cheap or rare, steadily down brown

Liquor in the shadows. I feel you whether I can see
You or not.  This lambent space is not for you, but
All for you at the same time. Whether you can keep

Time, or not, through low-down blues or le jazz hot.
Either way, baby, I don’t worry. I don’t care once
That first note blows the dust of the highways,

Invisible grime of ramshackle roadhouses off my skin,
Smooths away the creases in my soul.  The wrinkles
In my gleaming gown were shower-steamed out hours ago.

Though I’ll sweat out the satin, wilt the white flowers in my hair
By the midnight show without a care. Streaming
Stage lights, gleaming curves of horns, breathless
music all meet in the voice that sets me free; for two
or three hours I’m undeniably, indelibly me.

Michele Sharpe

SWELL

The snake ventures out from leaf litter, believing in sun.
Like a rag wrung out, past usefulness, my spine contorts.

The snake has eaten, its sleek curves swelled by lumps.
The leaf litter releases some warmth. My ankles adore it.

The snake settles in, supple, silent, a black rope unslung in heat.
My collarbone joints swell, two knobs throbbing at my throat.

The snake is cryptic, but the deer—their white-flag tails flash.
My wrists are bound by weather. How can bodies betray themselves?

Tara Shea Burke talks about embodied poetry
and writing Animal Like Any Other

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?

When I started writing poems, I was in middle school. I wrote as a way to express my love for those who did not love me back. Maybe it was love. Or maybe it was just my body. Maybe it was every single thing my body was feeling, in a world that both at home, and in dominant culture, told me to stop feeling so much. I don’t really remember deciding to write poems, but I remember when a poem became home for something feral in me. I don’t know if I’m right, but I like to pretend I am when I say that there’s something about pre-teen years that turns our child bodies into animal bodies. And either you’re in middle school wet and feeling all over the place, or you’re suppressing it to fit in. Or, there’s been enough constriction in life to already cut the body off from even knowing what feeling is.

Actually, I’m lying. I started writing on the bus in fifth grade. It was a little red fuzzy journal. Or, it was pink. But it was passion. And it was my best friend who would write with me and we’d pretend we were writing about having sex with the boys in our grade. We’d make up these elaborate stories of seduction that I can only imagine were simple and not very seductive at all. We would giggle and share them until my teacher found my diary and made sure I knew there was something to feel shame about. Something happened after that—maybe my friend learned that what we were doing was embarrassing, but I just remember wanting to keep telling stories about our bodies and her no longer being there. So, I started writing to put my animal body on the page, to share it, to express the very normal thrust in me.

When I started writing poems in earnest, as an undergrad, it was to save my life. I was buckling under an eating disorder and ephedra addiction that turned into other substance abuse to control my body. I was ready to set fire to my life, to admit myself to a hospital, or the streets. And then I met a woman who was poetry, who laughed and played and was so in her body and so in love with nourishment and food. And I met Tim Seibles, who was unashamed to sing the body in his poems, so I crawled my way toward the English department at Old Dominion University to write about my body and hunger and in that, I tried to name the culture’s hand around my neck. I didn’t know I was doing it then, but I was trying to reclaim my body every time I put my pen to the paper. Every time. 

Land (as landscape, as origin, as destination) seems to play a huge part in this book, almost like its own character. It alternately comforts, tempts, disorients, and affirms the speaker’s existence. Can you say something about Animal Like Any Other and its relationship to land?

What a great question. I grew up on a long winding road above Paris, Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the woods. Something both beautiful and grotesque, both curious, imagination-inducing and dysfunctional about my family has to do with how we lived on that mountain. This is something I’m still trying to name and understand. For about five years, I was writing poems about living there that were too saccharin and devotional, and I was writing a lot of love poems about my girlfriend at the time, and the kind of domestic lesbian-ness I was discovering in the comfort of her home. I didn’t know I was seeking a safe place, someone to curl into and hide into until we broke up in a very abrupt and surprising way in 2017.

It was only then that I began to put many of my poems from home into conversation with my poems about our life together and really examine the way place, land, and home was a recurring theme, something I was trying to create and recreate in love and on the page. It’s hard to admit, but the mountain and home that raised me and my family was both a wilderness, a place of comfort, and a dangerous territory for my inner world. It was also never really safe, never really secure, and I knew it from a very young age. With my ex, we hoarded dogs and dreamed of big open land to have more dogs, chickens, goats, grow food, and be alone and away from the world under a vast sky. It was a story I told and told and told until it was true—the land to cultivate was this thing I looked forward to, this place I placed my creativity and imagery and imagination and also never truly cultivated once it was real.

The animals and sky and wild earth, after the relationship was over, became a place to investigate with language and intensity: what happens when I give myself over to the life I wanted that is no longer, or never was mine, and make it something on the page? What if we are in constant creation of the life and land we want, and how is this both violent and wrought? And then, how can looking closely at the stories I told help me become a better person, to learn about how to live more in line with the words that come out of my mouth, onto the page?

I guess what I’m saying is I feel so very human and so very very feral, so hungry for a relationship with the land. I stumble across it and find something old and primal when I give myself her. And still, I feel human, I feel white, I feel like a liar and storyteller and a body that has been violent and violated, like our earth, like my homes, in so many ways. I don’t know if I’m making sense of this yet, and I’m not sure I want to. What I’ll also say is that I like to put it all on top of one another: to meander in language, to associate. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with the idea of New Mexico, and why it was never quite my home. I could stand under a sky and see both night and day, both star and moon and sunset, a million stars, a million sunsets, plants that were both healing and dangerous, wind that both set me free and could set the whole ranchlands ablaze in an instant. And now I’m back in Virginia, trying to feel the wet green of home again. I think this book brought me home, helped me let go of many fantasies.

I really admire your form. It feels daring to me to write so many poems in such long prose blocks with minimal punctuation. At the end of “Queer Girl” you write, “go ahead tell me this is gratuitous let me spill open and quiet the very puritan ways of you let me spread my queer legs all over the language meant to keep me from everything....” It makes me think that this maximalist, inclusive style of writing was not by accident. Can you please discuss how you came to write in this form?

Ah, thank you! I feel a little bonkers trying to explain this as form, and I know that it’s not sophisticated, and perhaps will be flicked away by serious craft lovers. What the hell is it? It’s free verse and prose and also a ton of caesuras and exhausting pages of unpunctuated images and emotion. It’s a raw book. I know. And yes, it’s intentional. And it’s so risky, and won’t make it’s way onto any best lists or into the hands of people I admire. And that’s okay. These poems have been in me and have been working for about 7 years, some a little longer.

I suppose part of my survival in this body has been a whole lot of therapy to accept that I am a messy messy bitch, and I mean that in the best way. It hurts most of the time, and I struggle against this world I want so badly to love in every single breath of my life. And, the more I find my people, the more I know that dominant, patriarchal, western, colonist, capitalist, white supremacist culture has made it really really hard to be creative feelers at odds with all the demands of social normalcy. “Queer Girl” is a response to this, and so are many of the poems that just let loose and sdcoop up everything they possibly can with a big open mouth.

Almost all of the long, exhaustive prose block poems have tried to live in many other forms. They’ve been cut back and put into lines, separated into several poems, put back together, and then put away. I have tried so hard to tame them, but the only way these little stories—which I do feel needed desperately to live outside of me and in the hands of readers, even if only a few—could live were in this full fat block form. I exhausted myself every time I came back to them, and they hurt reading them and that is my intention.

I am interested in pain, in grief, in spilling. I am obsessed with layers and closeness and investigating many images at once. I don’t know if this is a form I’ll come back to, because finally embracing and revising these happened deep in the night during an exhaustive year of pain and grief, and I had to blare Zoe Keating’s haunting cello over and over and sip whiskey until the stuffing made sense. I read them again and again and stumbled and added and subtracted and if I’m honest, I look at them now in awe like WOW my body is a dangerous thing. 

Which, isn’t that the queerest answer to this question? I feel like my body has always been dangerous, and not in the way a patriarchal body can inflict danger, but in the way a woman who has studied your form and your ways and your rhymes can turn into a snarling boar, a body in the woods at night, terrified but still there, howling. What if we allowed our pleasures? What if we taught young bodies, and not just woman bodies but all young bodies, how to feel pleasure and pleasure themselves and heal themselves and to express fully? What if we let go, really, and healed ourselves into a place where pain and suffering and orgasm could exist together, where the money burns? I ask this only because that’s what I’m grasping for in these poems, is some goddamn answer to all the desire in me. In you, too.

QUEER GIRL

I have been the filthiest dirt the dirtiest dirt I have been queer like a cow pressing against a fence to taste what’s kept from her I have pressed and pressed and rubbed my body all over everything corners and pillows and electric toothbrushes and a vibrating neck pillow my mother slept on and what’s it like to have been born so queer the girl everyone said was pretty and bright until she talked or felt or told stories out loud or watched all the bodies in front of her for just a few moments too long or when she was in a hot tub with friends in fifth grade saying here press yourself here against the jets yes like that until we all laughed and came and I wonder still if they thank the tub and our orgasms together still so many women who don’t until their twenties or thirties or worse and yes I showed my friends how to come before I knew what the word orgasm was before I knew women should be ashamed of spreading their legs or pressing against anything on their own time or laughing with other young girls god forbid we found something together where are they now where are you young girls sing this song with me you were queer did you know that we found something together and now I know there is no word still for our better floods the flashed arroyos the dirty fingernails of our childhood pressed between the parts we still struggle to find the right words for labia mons pubis inner and outer and fatty sticky parts the scent now rising from my chair my legs open my arroyo still wet and muddy from a morning with my girlfriend her body a light I turned to and no I do not care that her body as light may be cliché to you fuck your rules fuck your right or wrong words for poems for sex the way we baby everything up with white powders and the talc that destroyed my grandmother’s ovaries her mother convincing her to powder her panties every single day of her life so only like a baby down there only like a powder like something white and so clean it kills well I hate being too clean give me the stink the old world wine with grit in the glass and dirt on the tongue let me place my tongue on everything let me learn audacity finally let my tongue on the dirt of me press shame out of everything out of you out of you a sweat no scent can hide a leather hide a dank dank earth a core we haven’t found yet my lesbian fingernails clipped down to pink skin so I can take my unwashed hand and discover all the darkest filthiest parts of myself is this uncomfortable and a little wrong a little unsanitary a bit in need of something that kills to wipe it up keep your clean things your white wipes and white powders and clean diets out of every part of me do you understand that even now I still hate myself like everything normative has told me to do you understand how badly I want to go back to the tub with those girls and grab their hands run free naked and covered in suds and every stank and dank liquid coming coming out of us go ahead tell me this is gratuitous let me spill open and quiet the very puritan ways of you let me spread my queer legs all over the language meant to keep me from everything let me tell you this keeps us from everything

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

One Turn Around the Sun, by Tim Seibles
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
I’m So Fine by Khadijah Queen
Heavy by Kiese Laymon (I recommend listening to him read on audio)
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
Writing as a Way of Healing by Luise DeSalvo
Deep Creek by Pam Houston
Drive Here and Devastate Me by Megan Falley
Skill in Action by Michelle Cassandra Johnson
Bluets by Maggie Nelson

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?

Find a body practice. Find teachers and healers that believe in and teach radical accessibility. Every single body has the ability to feel more, to move toward embodiment, to experience breath and sensation and some sort of movement, even if from the inside. There are amazing teachers out there resisting white supremacy in the wellness industry and bringing embodiment practices to all bodies.

I say this because poetry saved my life, but so did Yoga, and I don’t mean pretty poses, but the whole practice of Yoga that is about agency and practice that renounces dominant culture and reignites the creative human spirit, which I do believe can save us all. So, find a practice that works for you, that wakes up your inner world. Pay attention. Take classes, read a lot, but really, take your beautiful imperfect body out into the world and start feeling more, looking closer, and document it all, in any way you can. Find others like you. Fuck the rest.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Tara Shea Burke stands in front of a white wall and looks at something beyond the right side of the photograph. She has chin-length curly brown hair, hazel eyes, and freckles. She wears a turquoise cross necklace, a faded black tank top, and a sleeveless black-and-white striped overshirt.

Jim Ferris

BRISTLECONE

it’s not like you’re actually thinking
of killing yourself, not eyeing that sleek
over and under or weighing rimfire
vs. centerfire — can you ever truly
respect someone who goes rimfire —
more that you just want it to stop, sure,
you know narcotics, and that moment when
you realize nothing is hurting
anywhere, a rare and precious thing,
but it never lasts, and who wants to be
sleepy all the time? it’s the drip drip drip
that wears away at you, this is where
the Grand Canyon came from, grain by grain,
quark by lepton, sure, pain makes you tougher,
nobody realizes my toughness —
until it wears you down to a nubbin — 
it’s hard to imagine a tough nubbin —
even though the part that’s left after all
is ground away must be the hardiest.
Ponderosas and redwoods get all
the glory, but the bristlecone — that’s
a tough tree. Hurting a little less now,
deep breath. There’s always tomorrow.

Jennifer Hancock

INHERITANCE

what terrifies me most: 

becoming her 

striking with the back 

of my hand and then 

pulling the stricken 

close in what passes 

for love for comfort 

it comes out of me like 

the poison I sprayed on 

weeds today violence 

all around and casual 

I yell at the puppy 

yank on the leash and 

the sky grows dark 

the air sick and sticky 

like the Texas coast 

this is trauma why I 

don’t have kids or guns 

why I’ve never learned 

to land a solid punch 

or trust the low sky 

of my own anger

Jo Angela Edwins

HEARTBEATS

were everywhere
the weeks before
my heart attack,
the bass line to
a favorite song
on a new album,
the persistent thump
of my dog’s tail
on the porch railing,
the punctuated thrum
of a nearby hospital’s
generator engine,
the clack of a storm-
loosed limb from an oak
against the roof’s edge. 

I noticed it all.
I thought to myself,
“Humans can’t help
but find our own bodies
in everything.” A fact
we know and will not
work to change.
Even this poem—
its hint at omens,
at warnings from a god
we make every day
in our own fitful image.

Were we to see God—
whatever it is, no
he, no she, in its
own inconceivable
shape, perhaps
our hearts, as they say,
would stop dead as a
lazy metaphor.

Perhaps, instead,
the beat would drum
as always, the muffled
cry of a child, arms
stretched towards the center
of its cradle, its source.

Linda Lamenza

ATOMIC NUMBER 22: TITANIUM

From the Greek word titans,
first sons of Earth. Used
in the aerospace industry—

airframes, engines,
screw blades on ships,

bike frames that withstand extreme
temperatures. Strong as steel,
only lighter. Found in meteorites

and the sun, only element
that burns in pure

nitrogen. High strength, toughness,
corrosion resistant wedding rings,
low-density money clips,

artists’ paints, my
reconstructed elbow.

Holly Day

HARVEST

we found that tomatoes grew best in the cemetery
sending their thick roots deep
into the soil, wrapping thickly-furred cilia between
sinew and bone, found new life in places
left for the dead.

we threw our seeds random between
the overgrown plots, hoping the tiny plants would escape
the eyes of the caretaker, the blades of his mower
the heavy footsteps of other people
visiting other graves.

late summer, when the vines rose high
climbed around the rough trunks
of ancient willows of firs
we crept into the graveyard, baskets under our arms
collected enough ripe fruit to last through
the long, cold winter ahead.

Issue 56 Contributors

Steven Luria Ablon, poet and adult and child psychoanalyst, teaches child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and publishes widely in academic journals. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. His previous collections of poetry are Tornado Weather 1993, Flying Over Tasmania 1997, Blue Damsels 2005, Night Call 2011, and Dinner in the Garden 2018. His website is: stevenablonpoetry.com

Maura Alia Badji is a poet/writer/artist/intuitive energy healer/ESL teacher. She is and identifies as, a disabled and multiracial woman, Her heritage includes Sicilian, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Latinx, Scot-Irish, and Southeast Asian ancestry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Aeolian Harp, The Deaf Poets Society, The Delaware Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Phoenix Soul, The Skinny Poetry Journal, WELTER, The Good Men Project, This City Is a Poem, Barely South Review, The Healing Woman, Liberated Muse, and others. Maura lives in Virginia Beach with her teen son, Ibrahim.

Tara Shea Burke is a queer poet and teacher from the Blue Ridge Mountains and Hampton Roads, Virginia. She's a writing instructor, editor, creative coach, and yoga teacher who has taught and lived in Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. Her writing has appeared in Erase the Patriarchy, a book of sexual assault and rape erasures, edited by Isobel O’Hare and University of Hell Press, and Reading Queer, Poetry in the Time of Chaos, edited by Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton from Anhinga Press, as well as many journals and anthologies. To find more about her writing and work visit www.tarasheaburke.com.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and The Tampa Review. Her newest poetry collections are In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), Folios of Dried Flowers and Pressed Birds (Cyberwit.net), Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), and Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing).

Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in various magazines and anthologies, and her chapbook Play was published in 2016. She has received awards from Poetry Super Highway, SC Academy of Authors, and Winning Writers, and she is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. She lives in Florence, SC, where she teaches at Francis Marion University.

Jim Ferris is a poet, performance artist, and scholar in communication studies. Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio, from 2015-2019, Ferris has received awards for performance and mathematics as well as poetry and creative nonfiction. He is author of Slouching Towards Guantanamo, Facts of Life, and The Hospital Poems, which won the Main Street Rag Book Award in 2004. Ferris, who holds a doctorate in performance studies, has performed at the Kennedy Center and across the United States, Canada and Great Britain; recent performance work includes his current one-man performance Is Your Mama White? as well as the solo performance Scars: A Love Story. Past president of the Society for Disability Studies and the Caucus of Disabled and D/deaf Writers Caucus, he is founding chair of the Disability Issues Caucus of the National Communication Association.. Ferris was named outstanding scholar in performance and theatre by the Central States Communication Association. Since 2008, Ferris has held the Ability Center of Greater Toledo Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo, where he directs the School of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Rachael Gay is a poet and artist living in Fargo, North Dakota. Her work has appeared in journals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Quail Bell, Rag Queens, Déraciné Magazine, Gramma Poetry, FreezeRay Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review and others as well as the anthology What Keeps Us Here (2019).

Jennifer Hancock’s collection of poems, Between Hurricanes, was published by Lithic Press in 2015. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ecotone, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Colorado Mesa University, and is working on a manuscript of post-apocalyptic baseball poems.

Linda Lamenza is a poet and literacy specialist in Massachusetts. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Constellations, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and The Tishman Review. She is a member of Poemworks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets. Linda is fluent in Italian and enjoys spending time at the beach with her family. She is also a fan of seaside reading and writing.

Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. The author of the poetry collection Back East (Moon Pie Press) and the memoir Walk Away (Kindle Singles), her works appear in venues including The Rumpus, The Washington Post, B O D Y, Guernica, Catapult, Poet Lore, and North American Review.

Ann E. Wallace’s new poetry collection, Counting by Sevens, is available from Main Street Rag (https://mainstreetragbookstore.com). Recently published pieces in journals such as Mom Egg Review, Wordgathering, Snapdragon, Riggwelter, as well as Rogue Agent, can be found on her website AnnWallacePhD.com. She lives in Jersey City, NJ and is on Twitter @annwlace409.