RogueAgent

ISSUE 47
CONTENTS

FEBRUARY 2019


Katherine Fallon
Victoria Nordlund
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Emily Murman
Emma Cairns Watson
INTERVIEW: Juliet Cook
John Grey
Timothy Cook
Chelsea Bodnar
Megan McDermott
Jesica Carson Davis

CONTRIBUTORS

Katherine Fallon

INTRODUCTION

I am the early urban crocus
in a cloak of ice. I am your
favorite four-letter word, full
mailbox, the mythical candle
burning evenly, day after endless
day, charmed I’m sure. I am rock
quartz axed open, fool's gold
glittering stupidly in the shaken
pan. I am the ancient, paint-
chipped radiator's knock,
keeping you up, promising heat.
I’m a swept floor you didn’t
have to sweep, the soaking bean
gone soft-ish though without yield,
the small-breasted peep show
the city of Brotherly Love gives
no tip, though I suspect you would.
Oh hello there. I do not draw
the curtains at dusk.
I’ve not got curtains.

Victoria Nordlund

MYIASIS

Myiasis is a rare disease primarily caused by infestation of tissue by larvae of houseflies. Oral myiasis is still more “rare” and “unique” owing to the fact that the oral cavity rarely provides the necessary habitat conducive for a larval lifecycle. --From the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology

Your tongue is too big
for your mouth. You tell yourself
it has always been this way.

You hold it, and realize
you have held it for so long.
You try pulling it loose,

dislodging it from its roots,
but it swells even more,
blocking your breath. 

This is one of those dreams
where you are alone
in front of a bathroom mirror

reflecting on a self
your subconscious
says you need to see.

This is one of those dreams
where you know you
are dreaming but you can't

wake up, or fly away, or change
the scene. So here you are calmly
inspecting your engorged organ.

You consider your options---
squeezing could release the pressure---
so you might be able to speak again. 

This is normal--- A pimple
to be popped. But it won't budge,
and you grow impatient.

You take a scalpel that is next
to your electric toothbrush and Oil of Olay
and try to penetrate a tongue

that has now turned black—
A swollen eel that doesn't shock you.
Deciding it will take too much effort to break

the surface, you tell yourself you can easily
live like this. You are tired and you
find this funny because you are sleeping.

So you convince yourself to leave well
enough alone even when you feel
something hatching and rising.

But the dream opts for removal
of this squirming mass. The scalpel
is now a sword---heavy and sharp.

You can do this. 

But you don't,
even though you know
what has made a home inside.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

DEAR HR PERSON FROM HEALTHSOUTH WHO CALLED

to say I did not get the job, I did not mean offense when I laughed. How rare it is to hear back
from a job application when we do not get the job. More often we hear nothing. In this century
there is no long line waiting for work outside the plant to be told by a hard-faced foreman there
are no shifts, no waiting for your script out on the dock. We walk with smoke in our skulls. We
apply on line. We hit send. You write and send in your life on a page and hope for an interview
and afterwards you hear nothing. So to get a call telling me that job went to someone else, I bet
to that young woman with the long dark hair I met in the waiting room who looked like she
could run a marathon, and well I suspected I was too old for the job when I saw the recruiter’s
eyes, though she did brighten when I said I knew how to make an excel file, and seemed
impressed at my knowledge of medications though she said I would we doing mostly PT,
physical therapy and I thought of the lifting and my knees and maybe she saw me slightly wince,
though by the end of the interview I still had hope but after two weeks I thought well that’s that,
and then you called. How many of us are out there waiting by the phone? We hear nothing. The
only music I can write is written in the dust I do not sweep. There is a broom somewhere just my
height, there is a box or person waiting for me to lift. No one even calls to say, no. No one points
to us to say you are not needed, so I thank you for your call. Dear HR person, your voice tells me
there is a file with my name, I nearly cry when you say, “It will be kept on file in case of any
future openings we think that you will fit.” Like a puzzle into a box, or a body into a ditch? We
have become the invisible masses. We are out there waiting for the bus, as you pass on your
morning commute. I want to say to you what Coleridge wrote, “Work without Hope draws nectar
in a sieve,/ And Hope without an object cannot live.” I am an object, with two hands and eyes.
But I have vanished! In statistics, we are only seen if we ask the government for help. Once that
check on Friday stops, no bureaucrat can say we are a number, a statistic that means we are
waiting in rooms, sending out applications. This is not simply despair.  What unearned wage we
wear is weighed upon our shoulders?  In the refrigerator is only milk and margarine, a pile of
banquet meals. Any little we have we buy a bottle of something cheap. We stare out at the light
that falls against a brick wall. The sirens howl all night. We turn back to the static in our brains.
And what do we call ourselves these days? So many of the jobs we sell ourselves for contract
wage? For temporary positions? Are we no longer workers? Waiting to be loaded in the back of
a pick-up where nobody bothers to write down your name. For how long we say here are our
bodies, take them. Make them bend. Give us our daily bread.

Emily Murman

RADISH GIRL

You ask if my sweater is on and I say
no     today’s the day I broil
in the sun
dusty and tight, my scars purpling
I look like a radish when the
                       rest of me reddens I’m shriveling
near-naked on
the beach 

sandstuckto my soft spots should I peel
them with a paring knife?  If you are going
to stare I might as well blacken and bleed

I’m going to swish
sand and beach glass in my mouth
     up gravelled
spit                 blood on the boardwalk

sogging my bikini to stop you from saying
I’m beautiful because
I know you want to stab me
why don't you come cut off a slice?

Emma Cairns Watson

THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL SAYS TO REMOVE THE PUMP FOR INTIMACY AND SWIMMING

I am a creature of cords, clear wire;
something potent. I take you now by the arm
to show you the crevice I come
out of after dark. Smiling nightly, swinging
the long, long anchor, I am nothing
of kisses: when I want to gasp I gasp
and when I want to eat, I eat.
According to the manual,
there are seven moments to understand:
The Production. The Calculation.
The Entrance. The Decision.
The Approval.
                                    The Feed. The Finish.

The manual does not give instructions
for afterward, how to wind yourself around yourself
to sleep. 

Juliet Cook talks about embodied poetry
and writing Malformed Confetti

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?

In my teenage years and early twenties, I tended towards writing story poems based on characters who weren't really me (and who seemed more interesting than me) and fairy tale like horror poems and other melodrama that wasn't based on my own real life experience or my own body, so much as me wanting to extract my strong dramatic feelings in a strong dramatic way, that sometimes involved bodily dynamics, but not specifically my own.

As I became a more experienced writer, with more of my own life experience in addition to developing my own genuine feeling artistic style, I became increasingly able to express myself on a more personal poetic level, fusing real life experience with my own thoughts, feelings, and portrayals of the body, as well as my portrayal of how others interpret bodies.

When I was younger, my poetry did not naturally emerge from my brain the way I ideally wanted it to. It usually took a significant amount of revision (from months worth to years worth)to get a poem the way I wanted it to be. When I was 33, after having been working on my poetry for over 15 years, it finally started to flow out more naturally, in a way that felt comparable to being able to quickly write out dream visuals into poetry. Sometimes a whole poem would come out fast and just require minor revision. Other times, just a few lines would come out and would take time to evolve.

I still have times when the poetry isn't emerging and flowing as naturally and every single line that comes out annoys me shortly thereafter and I worry that my flow might be lost for a very long time or forever. But so far, it always seems to reemerge - and overall, my artistic flow and what it creates feels more natural, fluid, and true.

A stroke I had when I was 37 caused an unexpected in-between phase. I suffered from some brain damage, had to re-learn the alphabet and basic words, had mild aphasia and serious memory issues and couldn't spell, read, or write for a while - and after re-learning to read, I couldn't understand my own poems for a while. I was very worried and nervous about attempting to write poetry again after that, because what if I couldn't.

But thank goodness, the poetic part of my brain was not lost. For a while after that, my poetry came out shorter, more abstract, and more visual. In my in-between phase, when I still had a lot of trouble with words, and could only attempt to read and write in small doses without causing brain discombobulation and headaches, I created abstract visual art instead of/in addition to poems.

Currently, I do both the visual art and the poems - and the poems can be either abstract feeling or poetically journalistic feeling or both.

In the past, a lot of my poems included food words and body part words, but since my brain damage mostly impacted basic words, some of the food and body part words got replaced with less specifics and more visual emotional interpretations.

Malformed Confetti reminds me of Grimod de la Reynière’s roti sans pareil, an indulgent meat dish which involves deboning and nesting birds inside of other birds, seventeen birds altogether, until you get to the center, which is a garden warbler stuffed with an olive. Your images nest inside one another until the reader is transported into an alternate reality where “blown up promotional balloons are now bloody crullers, / misplaced phalli, bulbous sausages ready to burst / out their conjoined links” (69). How did you develop this incredibly fearless maximalist style? How has your voice changed from when you were just starting out?

I love that description!

I already described aspects of how my voice has changed, but I also think that over time and based on different life experiences, some of my content has changed from tending towards the grotesque, macabre, and quirkily horrific with a female focus to tending towards the depressed and existentially nihilistic (especially about relationships or anything lasting forever), but I also think my poetry has almost always involved elements of both. Also, I'm certainly not a total nihilist, or else why would I be so focused on poetry and art (by myself and others) and ongoing communication?  Maybe for me, the overall deep and multifaceted meaning of life is ongoing self-expression, especially via poetry - and the reason death scars me is because then your self-expression ends.

Malformed Confetti's content as a whole fuses those various parts of me together, since the poems inside the book range from 2008 to 2015 - pre-stroke to post-stroke, since I had my stroke in 2010 and exactly one year later, I got divorced.

I like your description of my creative work as having an "incredibly fearless maximalist style", since aspects of my poetry could be read as excessive, complex, and redundant in a strangely elaborate sort of way. I think those ideas suit me, my personality, and my poetry. Occasionally, I've had times of wondering and worrying if my unintentional redundancy and repetition indicates that I am stuck in some sort of stagnant plateau or purgatorium, but it's not like I don't move up and down, sometimes in different directions; it's more like my overall structure is a misshapen, slightly digressive circle shape that moves around, slightly mutates and diverges,  has small surges, and changes over time.

Sometimes when I worry about redundancy or repetition, I think of the art of Louise Bourgeois, which I love. Bourgeois said, "Revisit the same themes over and over again (but also keep experimenting)".

As long as I keep experimenting and expressing myself my way, what comes out comes out, and if the same words and thoughts keep extracting themselves from inside me, in slightly different ways, I think there must be a reason.

My mind feels like the opposite of black and white - and my creative work reflects my mind. My mind cannot be narrowed down into an easy simple sentence or at least it doesn't feel like it can.

SNAKE IN A CAN GAG

1. Oh Darlingtonia, secrete your nectar for me.  Oh lewd mucilage.
Oh fleshy funnel cake.  Your nectar bribe is laced with poison.
Your forked tongue leaf is purplish-green and beckons me
to dip another finger into your translucent false exit.

*

2.  I wanted to stick my hand down the garbage disposal.
Right before the roller coaster plummeted downhill, I wanted to
grab the scaffolding.  I wanted to snap necks, cut veins, throw poison
darts inappropriately.  Desire is sometimes rooted in sick compulsion.
Desire is sometimes strangled by twisted consumption. I wanted
to give you something different.  Serve you up mangled flesh.

*

3. I dispatched my rabid flock of killer carrier pigeons post-haste.
“Bring me back his gonads, girls!” said I
& so they did, compressed into their little silver leg vials.
When I took off the lids, the harvested penis sprang out
like the snake in a can gag.  “That gives mixed nuts a new meaning,”
I laughed o my exotic flock of carrion pigeons.  They advanced.

* 

4. They may occasionally catch small vertebrates such as rats and lizards
& bestow in bite-size pieces upon my porch or under my pillow. 
They can seal the lobes hermetically and form a specialized
stomach.  Sometimes I think of my special birds as each made up
of a central ovary and two wings on either side.

A lot of your imagery seems like it would fit very nicely into a surrealist horror film where “a dissecting tray filled with mildewed desecration / will not make anybody swoon, / until [the protagonist’s] beheading” (86). To what extent have other artistic genres influenced your work?

To an indirect extent, I feel like aspects of my creative work have been influenced or inspired by my own thoughts/feelings/personal experiences fused with thoughts/feelings elicited from others' visual art and poetry, horror films, supernatural films and psychological thrillers. I feel like some of my poetry combines aspects of the surreal with parts of my reality. Also included in my poetry are my own bad dreams, different interpretations (and treatment) of feminism, different interpretations (and treatment) of female bodies, and different interpretations (and treatment) of long term relationships (many of which, in my mind, seem too straightforwardly basic and dull and boring borderline trapped and rooted in the outdated concept of proposal and then commitment, even if you no longer continue paying attention to each other as individuals and growing together - rather than the more appealing-to-me concept of continually appreciating and exploring each other as individuals with whom you are connected in unique ways and continue to grow, both separately and together).

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

Ever since my stroke, my reading process and memories associated with reading (and movies and other things too) are different. My reading tends to be slower, in part because I need to concentrate more. While my writing has become more naturally productive, my reading has become less naturally productive and requires more concentration and repetition when reading something new. Thus I tend to read poetry in short phases and small doses, rather than reading an entire new book or chapbook within a week. I tend to be reading small parts of so many different things (and then forgetting details not long after reading something), that I feel uncomfortable about narrowing my reading down to a "read write now" list of books.

Maybe my brain is exaggerating this and/or just processing it my own way, but sometimes I feel a bit upset and overwhelmed in recent years because it seems like my reading process is slower but more focused whereas a lot of people's reading processes seem faster but less focused, as they seem to quickly dive from this to that.  My brain doesn't understand how other brains seem to be able to process a book of poetry within a few days and then move on to the next. Sometimes I feel slow and out of the loop and behind the times, in terms of books that came out in the last few years.

This is not to say that I'm uninterested in recent work and that I don't still read; it's more like if I start reading a book in 2018, chances are I won't finish reading that entire book until after 2020 and by then, I feel like more than half the world of poetry readers probably would have been on to the next book (and the next book and the next book) for more than two years - and thus me mentioning a two year old book that I just finished reading might seem outdated.

I have tons (as in hundreds) of partially read (and as yet unread) poetry books and chapbooks on my floors, but instead of naming 5-10 partially read books, I'm going to name 7 online literary magazines that I've been a significant fan of reading the last few years. In no particular order, those would be Rogue Agent - Rag Queen Periodical (which unfortunately is about to publish its final issue) - Bone & Ink - Rising Phoenix - Yes, Poetry - Glass: A Journal of Poetry - Menacing Hedge.

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?

Your body is your own and your poetry is your own. Write what feels real and important and meaningful to you, whether it's positive or negative, uplifting or disturbing, scary, painful, challenging, questioning, exploring, angry, or contradictory.  Craft your work into your own ideas and adaptations about what you think poetry and expression and poetic communication should be. Set your own personal goals and work at your own pace, using your own process. Don't rush yourself, just keep working your way. Feel free to change your own process and change your mind. Maintain your own genuine passion. Don't fake it. Don't give up on yourself. Don't expect "success" right away, but also define "success" your own way. Feel free to be moved by and inspired by the work of others, but don't copy the style of others.  Create yourself and feel yourself grow and develop through your own creations. Read the work of others, read and consider the thoughts/feelings/ideas of others related to poetry, but also keep in mind that your creative work is your own, your creative projects are your own, your creative decisions are your own. You don't need to abide by other people's agendas and you don't need to fit into any particular group. Be yourself.

John Grey

MY MIND IS MADE UP

By the time the sun sets,
I will be ensconced in a box
with tiny holes for letting
in moonlight and sound and air. 

Nothing will change for me
from one night to the next.
Conversation will be seldom
and only with myself.

 Knock on my outside
and you may as well
spin your wheels into oblivion.
There’s no way in. 

Yes, I’ll have plenty
of time to think
but nothing
of any consequence.

It was thinking that
led me to this decision.
And thoughts are not designed
for reconsideration.

Call me a hermit if you must.
But I’m not cutting myself off
from the world.
In fact, I’m becoming the world. 

To me, the world is a made-up mind
and a place to secure it.
I am one of these already.
My body is the other.

Timothy Cook

CREATION MYTH

Sunday morning you will not be at Mass
but at the ophthalmologist’s office.

More than the chart, the two foot tall E
you can see clearly when you open

your left eye, you will hate the finger test.
How many fingers am I holding up?

the doctor will ask. How many
now? Monday afternoon

an MRI: the camera clicking will sound like
a lawn mower roaring beside your skull

or techno. You will remember
raves, beach-ball-sized nitrous balloons

carried above the roller rink crowd. Tuesday
the diagnosis— 

                        you will know
the look on your face from the look

on the doctor’s face, a mirror 
                        with a skipping record.  

°

After the IV insertion
you will paddle motionless water
at the Skokie Lagoons on an overcast day

till smelling salt elbows you in the forehead.
What’s your name? Where are you?
the nurses will yell. You will remember

standing in an unlit bathroom chanting
Bloody Mary. At night you will lie

in bed unable to think about anything but
the catheter in your wrist. Though hidden
beneath a bandage you will feel it

under your skin, in your vein,
at every moment you will know
it is there. You will remember

Ghost in the Graveyard,
Catch One Catch All
summer nights. When the spike

is removed you will feel cured
though a phantom limb itch will haunt you
for weeks. You will remember Seven Minutes

in Heaven, friends gathered around you,
their middle & index fingers beneath
your body, their voices repeating

Light as a feather, stiff as a board.

°

Lesions, scars, plaques
you have heard called
the white blotches—

you will be thinking
            parasite
while the neurologist quickly clicks

the mouse, images switching
so fast it looks like
            a feeding hummingbird. 

You will not be thinking of
an inkblot that simultaneously portrays
a bat & two faces approaching for

a kiss, you will not remember
            your optical illusion
science project: the young woman’s profile/

the crone’s face. You have always wondered
what doctors see when they look in
your ear, your nose, your throat,

but seeing your brain,
            your self,
the consciousness you cling to

so tightly, reduced to
            a clump of tissue,
you will be on the verge of vomiting.

 °

You will live, will not die

even if you choose not to
inject yourself every day

forever. You will remember
your heroes were intimate

with needles. Under Depression
the Medication Guide will state

Some patients have thought about or
have attempted to kill themselves.

Feeling as though you are
crowded around your parents’

living room watching yourself
on super 8, you will stay home

from the party & rent horror movies.
Skin littered with injection holes

like the mouths of volcanoes,
you will remember your heroes

committed suicide as you watch
hosts of the undead, blood

dripping over their chins,
terrorize the living.

Chelsea Bodnar

WHAT I AM DOING WITH MY LIFE:

Lessons on how to be blunt object.
Lessons on the lifelong bleeding out
that drags us down
to no-man’s-land

Together.  You don’t get it, so
don’t roll your window down
and call me fine.

In my background

Sylvia’s mouth, perfect
and dead, murmuring
your body hurts me.

And despite things, it’s starting to look like
I’m living longer

than the curse
that makes your comet’s
afterimage stick

These words burned in
my screen,
their pixels white/unreal as ghosts

Baby, you don’t want
this headache

Not forever

My sweet-tooth
broken off by stranger’s
hand

Megan McDermott

SATURDAY NIGHT COMMUNION, SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE

Cup of salvation, straight peach schnapps – consecration by desire.
We danced and drank in the living room, me in a borrowed bra

after a roommate declared my boobs underwhelming.
Ritualized preparation for strange hands sliding down our hips.

I hadn’t discerned yet what counted as sin – the drunkenness,
the touching, both? I only knew the list of things God didn’t want

me to want had grown tedious. My body up against a stranger’s
up against a wall wrote its own theology – liberation treatise

on limbs previously dedicated to an obvious and irrepressible
aura of abstinence. That year, I let the aura peel, though facts

underneath stood firm. I was fine with being a virgin
as long as I didn’t dance like one. Sometimes I wondered

what guys guessed, though I clarified myself by the night’s
end – the way I’d let our bodies move together, aggressive,

then duck their kisses and scurry home in a protective gaggle
of girls drunk off Arbor Mist, a friend once yelling,

“She’s literally preaching tomorrow,” to rebuff a football player
who wanted us to get high back in his dorm room. Whoever

was least drunk proffered reminders about drinking lots of water
while we exchanged forehead kisses goodnight – blessing

what was done and left undone. In there somewhere, unspoken
reassurance: Christ’s body still in ours, twenty-one and horny,

collapsing onto respective beds, wondering, sighing,
What if, this time, I had told that stranger yes, yes?

Jesica Carson Davis

A HOLIDAY IS A POINT ON A CALENDAR, WHICH IS A CYCLE
after James Davis

Time in a box     that you don't notice until you do
the stove has an eye, your hand, the needle

(keep going). There is a silhouette, an outline
someone in the distance          attempting attention;

the thud as it lands. Impact reverberates in skeleton.
Today, ignore the difference between outside and in.

A wonder, a break that hovers          just out of reach
waiting to be touched. Whose hands are these

that pull from beneath, you forgot to ask.
Basic corporal maintenance becomes a weighted task.

There are scenes you keep filed under snow
and all its meanings. Numbness begins to creep, which is to say

unfeeling. Uncertainty. A flicker at the edges,
a facet of self-preservation. What it means to be done.

Issue 47 Contributors

Chelsea Margaret Bodnar / 1990 / stay-at-home mother of dust.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: The Bennington Review, Sad Girl Review, Wyvern Lit, Leopardskin & Limes, Menacing Hedge, Freezeray, and others.  Her first chapbook, Basement Gemini, was recently released by the incomparably beautiful humanoids of Hyacinth Girl Press.

Juliet Cook’s poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including a collaboration with j/j hastain called "Dive Back Down" (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), and an individual collection called "From One Ruined Human to Another" (Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, 2018). Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, “Horrific Confection”, was published by BlazeVOX more than ten years ago. Her more recent full-length poetry book, "A Red Witch, Every Which Way", is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Her most recent full-length individual poetry book, "Malformed Confetti" was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in late 2018. Cook also sometimes creates semi-abstract painting collage art hybrid creatures. Find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Timothy Cook, an Edgewater Chicago native, graduated from Loyola University with a BA in philosophy and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared in some places, and he is a recipient of a grant from the Mookie Jam Foundation, which supported artists living with multiple sclerosis.

Jesica Carson Davis’s work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Zone 3, Columbia Poetry Review, Stoneboat, Storm Cellar, After Hours, and other places, including a chapbook published with StillBlackWater Press. She is an Associate Editor for Inverted Syntax literary journal, studied poetry at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), worked as a typesetter for the University of Chicago Press, and was the final Alice Maxine Bowie Fellow at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She currently lives in Denver, where she’s working on several poetry manuscripts and an ongoing project making poemboxes, which sculpturally interpret her words. She can be found on the internet here.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 16 books including The Second O of Sorrow published in 2018 by BOA Editions, and Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (2019 NYQ Books). He works as a care giver and Med Tech for various disabled populations and lives with the poet Lisa M. Dougherty and their two daughters along Lake Erie. More info on Sean can be found at seanthomasdoughertypoet.com

Katherine Fallon attended Bryn Mawr College and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Permafrost, Meridian, Colorado Review, Oxidant Engine, and more. She is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing & Linguistics at Georgia Southern University and lives above the gnat line with her favorite person and a handful of animals, both domestic and feral. Her chapbook, The Toothmakers’ Daughters, is available through Finishing Line Press. 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Harpur Palate and Columbia Review with work upcoming in the Roanoke Review, the Hawaii Review and North Dakota Quarterly.  

Megan McDermott recently graduated from Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, an interdisciplinary program on religion and the arts. She first studied writing and religion together as an undergraduate at Susquehanna University. Now Megan serves as a minister at an Episcopal church in Massachusetts. Her work has been published in The Amethyst Review, The Windhover, Rock & Sling, Letters, and The Cresset, among others. You can find her on Twitter @megmcdermott92.  

Emily Murman is a poet and fiction writer from the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  She holds a bachelor's of arts in writing and has published or forthcoming work in Déraciné, Okay Donkey, Milk + Beans, Cease Cows, and Butter Press. Emily can be found on Twitter @emilyrosenurman.

Victoria Nordlund is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut. Her chapbook Binge Watching Winter on Mute will be published in Spring 2019 by Main Street Rag. She is a 2018 Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Gone Lawn, Ghost Proposal, Philosophical Idiot, and other journals. You can read more of her work at https://www.victorianordlund.com/poetry

Emma Cairns Watson is a graduate of Smith College, where she studied English literature and neuroscience. She now lives on the opposite coast, coordinating university conferences on Egyptology by day and attempting to write while balancing the notebook on top of a very persistent lapdog at night. A poetry editor at Honey & Lime, her own work is forthcoming in RHINO, Pithead Chapel, and Ninth Letter. You can find her on Twitter @EmmaValjean.