RogueAgent

ISSUE 48
CONTENTS

MARCH 2019


Lindsay Seeley
Sydney Vance
M Wilder
Ace Boggess
Christina Yoseph
ART: Bill Wolak
Cate McGowan
Megan Mary Moore
Rodney Wilder
Teow Lim Goh
Lana Bella

CONTRIBUTORS

Lindsay Seeley

A MOUTHFUL OF RAINWATER IS A BATH FOR WARBLERS

The whites of my eyes
turn amber with sap

The solemn heads of morels
rise from my shoulders as earthly epaulets

Sparrows pull the twigs from my hair to
build warm and dirty nests

Mice scamper inside my hollow trunk to
make room between my ribs

Lichen spread across my back in
intricate moldy ruffles

Hushed breezes through tree boughs
whisper peaceful sermons on both being and not

A brown spider has spun a web in the cup of my ear
and tucked herself in, sleeping.

Sydney Vance

LISTEN. IN MY THROAT IS A STORY I WILL NEVER TELL.

I will tell other stories, but I will not tell
that one. Listen. In the springtime, sunscreen  

sometimes smells a little like lavender. We tie rope
to a tree and swing into a river, debate

how many articles of clothing is too many. Cicada
won’t let us speak more than we need to. Evening 

is our jukebox. Listen. Some people will never see
this never-one-color southern sky, and what a shame.

We are so lucky in so many ways. We count them.
One, the river.  Two, the lake. Three, the plains. Four, 

the plains. Listen. This could be anybody’s love story,
and so could I. I could say that the wind was pornographic

when it blew through my hair, across that skin tracing the empty
on my inner arm. I could say that the sunset-light made me  

ethereal and undeniable. I could say that I stood naked
somewhere in the westernmost part of my state, laughing,

and wanted to be seen. Maybe I fell for the heat. Maybe it was
that lavender-smell. Maybe the rope. Maybe it was 

the wind or the wet weight upon my skin—
but listen. That story will never speak, never see

the light of day. It would never foolishly give itself away
like that.

M Wilder

THE NATURE OF NOTHING

i.
there are insects even a child can’t see. lying
in the grass, chin propped up on a boney arm,
not everything alive is visible.
did you know,

every atom making up matter
is basically nothing.
if the nucleus of an atom is a marble,
its electrons are half a mile away.
so maybe nothing matters.
i am mostly composed of nothing,
all negatives and positives holding this
tension. always straining
to make me solid.
(yet i am hardly anything.)
did you know,

if you took away all this emptiness, every human
on this earth would fit inside a single sugar cube.
how sweet we could become, if only we
could become something,
all the emptiness emptied out of ourselves.

i put pen to paper and write all
this void out of me, press my eyes
closer, see every fraction, every fragment of me
etched out, before i am shaken, and
before i fall apart.

ii.
yet the caterpillar blossomed today.
he has slept in a mason jar on the kitchen sink window-sill for weeks.
did you know,
sometimes caterpillars look dead when they are growing,
their bodies swathed in cocoon,
all crunchy october leaf still
and hardly rustled.

he broke out of himself,
wings were black and blue and shining purple,
glazed yellow. i swear
he rolled his neck and said,
"luv! don't you realize that you'll open jars and lids and doors
for every broken beautiful thing?
don't you see the way you don't throw away what you thought
was dead?
something holy comes from it.
open the window, honey.
just give it time.
i swear, you
are made of what matters.
open the window and let the light rush in. it takes
up no space. one might say it's nothing. but this
will change everything."

Ace Boggess

“IS YOUR BEDROOM MAKING YOU SICK?”
—Google autofill

Camel crickets attend their ugly Mass in closets.
Centipedes enter & exit by smallest cracks
as if the keyholes in coffins just in case.

Sewer gas rises from drains like sulfur
from a dormant volcano waking up,
readying an eruption, then calamity.

The carbon monoxide leak from before
with a hole in the wall or busted pipe,
melted seal on the water heater.

Little ventilation & no light from outside,
lone window overlooking basement storage space. 

Yet the room’s luxurious in its unpleasantness,
comforting like a warm bath
in which I might sleep & drown, &

anyway, a paradise compared to my cell:
whenever fear approaches, there’s the door.

Christina Yoseph

EROSION

when i was born my parents
couldn’t agree on a name for me
so i ended up with two sets
instead of one 

in one i am understood to be
the land between two rivers
pumped

downstream
by a current diligently working
to digest and expel my foreign
body

in one i am
clawing 

at the river’s edge stealing
for myself samples
of earth selling myself
half-truths: unintentional
parting gifts of
the land’s periphery

in the other i am
understood to be a facsimile

of a fish
out of water—

i keep the names like
secrets under my

tongue a shelter
determined to hide them to
bend itself
until breaking

in a dream i recognize no knife
is too dull

to halve a sack of flesh a
collection of muscle and nerves with
no bone to adhere to 

in a dream a
cutting board:

a phantom hand

a fish thrashing
against dry land

Bill Wolak

THE BITTERSWEET SILENCE OF SILK

EACH WELCOME THAT DRAWS YOU CLOSER

SOMETHING UNUSUAL LICKED THE MIRROR

Artist statement:

What we can conceive of the universe is filtered through our bodies. Everything we perceive is deciphered by the brain using the senses and memory. But the concept of embodiment differs in different times and cultures. Thus, one of the central concerns of understanding how the body works is connected with establishing some model of embodiment based on either material or energy or some combination of both.

My collages play with the accepted notions of embodiment. In “The Bittersweet Silence of Silk” for example, I have conceived of the body as thinking hair. Hair becomes the very material of physical consciousness. However, today the notion of embodiment is developing away from the human body and into some sort of robotic matrix. Therefore, in “Something Unusual Licked the Mirror,”  I am imagining a type of robotic embodiment which I fondly call a “Wobot” (Wolak = Robot). In this robotic form, the senses have been replaced with incomprehensible mechanisms. In the future, one type of human embodiment will be centered on robotics. People will no longer be satisfied with the experience of merely being a body, they will desire, for example, to experience the internet from inside instead of as an outsider. Thus, all of the senses will be enhanced and transformed for those who view human embodiment as obsolete.

A more troubling form of embodiment involves organic material in nature that is looking back at us, experiencing us. Of course, the perceptions of us are completely incomprehensible to the human mind, so I have rendered plants with more recognizable sensory faculties. In “Each Welcome That Draws You Closer,” I have attempted to equip a lettuce with senses that everyone might recognize by suggesting that it has eyes, lips, ears, and mouth. In this way, vegetative life, with a more human embodiment, is looking back at us. What might that consciousness experience about us?

Cate McGowan

DARK KNOTS

Our consonants tilled the dry fields
with trenches and then furrowed hope,
and when we screamed, when they mourned,
we all placed pebbles on his tombstone.

Out on the pitch, a vixen carried her kits,
so stealthy, those silhouettes, dark knotted
like unblown roses. I dreamt we slept. We
didn’t. At two o’clock, the coroner arrived.

Megan Mary Moore

SHE WASN’T AFRAID OF INSECTS ANYMORE

When she walked through spiderwebs,
she didn’t refuse the silk, she rubbed it
into her forearm like lotion.

When her shoe stuck in the mud,
she walked on, letting her foot meet Earth
again, again, again.

 Her brain ached to lay down,
to live here, where webs and one bare foot
could disappear into some kind of decay
for Earth to play with until Earth was done.

But Earth wouldn’t have her.
Grew their vines up and around her,
politely declining her skin.

She laid for two months before she knew
the birds were laughing at her wandering,
lazy eye, never quite focused on the sun.

So, she washed seeds down her tub.
Shone lights down the pipes
watering with every shower
and slowly they grew,

purple cornflowers who wanted
to crawl inside her, her mouth, her nose,
her bellybutton. They petal-whispered Open up.

And she was buried, disappeared
under a tub field of flowers.
Hundreds of leaves, petals, stems,
and one blinking, lazy eye.

Rodney Wilder

DOUSE

I could not have more reason for light
to tear out of me, a daybreak
splaying over my tongue, so loved
that love becomes blood & breath, word
& will. I have not forgotten this gospel.
A sunrise known & known by, you
have sung me to so many shores I
should not have reached with life
left in my lungs.
                           The storm at sea:
my father. Trauma, the water I
thought you spared me from swallowing.
But I put my hand over the place I last
buried your warmth, and gallons of something
rotten now slosh & clot in response.
What I try to sigh out of my system doesn’t
leave anymore. A foment ever fed & souring &

what else could this be? What, if not that
                           coffin of an ocean
keeping its promise to drown me?

Teow Lim Goh

PETALS
for Jay DeFeo

Nude, you stand before the painting
you will sculpt for another
seven years – your eyes are closed,

your feet apart, your arms spread
like wings about to rise. Rays that you
will chisel into petals 

blaze from your body at
the center of a star, the beginnings
of a rose breaking forth—

Lana Bella

MONDEGREEN

I’m spinning, slow, in the old
garden of rocks, as if the sudden
eclipse of sun trades shadows
with an old ghost. I hold always
that girl who strides the land in
her seam and volume, pinging
against instincts like a whale in
the sea. Hands cup tendrils pin-
wheeling the fingertips, I blink
sapphire eyes that cut to the hill
somewhere, as daybreak drips
sky through the brambles back
to my footsteps on the cornered
stairs. Here, I know what’s like to
be gone for decades, sensing for
those little soft still rooks closest
to the frayed ordinary, fluttering,
silvery in the middle of memory,
like an erasure of sounds drawing
dark into a bullet, firing home.

Issue 48 Contributors
 

A four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net, & Bettering American Poetry nominee, Lana Bella is an author of three chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016), has work featured in over 520 journals, The Cortland Review, EVENT, The Fortnightly Review, Ilanot Review, Midwest Quarterly, New Reader, Notre Dame Review, Sundress Publications, & Whiskey Island, among others, and Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3.

Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of Islanders (Conundrum Press, 2016), a volume of poems on the history of Chinese exclusion at the Angel Island Immigration Station. Her work has been featured in Tin House, Catapult, PBS NewsHour, Colorado Public Radio, and The New Yorker. She lives in Denver.  

Cate McGowan is the author of the story collection, True Places Never Are (Moon City Press, 2015). A Georgia native, McGowan’s fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in many literary publications, including Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, Shenandoah, Into the Void, Vestal Review, and W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International. McGowan’s debut novel,These Lowly Objects, published by Gold Wake Press, will appear in 2020.

Megan Mary Moore holds an MFA in Poetry from Miami University. Her first collection of poetry, Dwellers, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. You can learn more about her poetry at meganmarymoore.com.

Lindsay Seeley writes poetry, short stories, and fiction filled with the dark, twisty bits of life that are most exciting. Her BA is in English and is currently pursuing a MA in Creative Writing. She lives in the part of the Pacific Northwest where people pay to throw fish at each other.

Sydney Vance resides just outside of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In the spring of 2017, she received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from The University of Central Oklahoma where she also served as the Senior Editor of Poetry for The New Plains Review. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Words Dance, Josephine Quarterly, SHANTIH, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Redivider, among others.

M Wilder is a youth librarian and poet, whose words may be found or forthcoming in Cicada, Desolate Country, thismuch, Monstering, Letters to a Young Poet, The New York Times online, and more. An editor of Sprout Club Journal, M has also served on editorial staffs for New Letters and Elementia. M can be found on instagram at @hereistheend.

Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

Bill Wolak has just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared recently in Naked in New Hope 2017, The 2017 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Poetic Illusion, The Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ, the 2018 Dirty Show in Detroit, and 2018 The Rochester Erotic Arts Festival.

Christina Yoseph (she/her) is an emerging writer whose essays and poems have been featured or are forthcoming in The Brown Orient, RaceBaitR, Sukoon, and more. She and her illustrator-musician girlfriend share a nest in California. You can find her work at www.christinayoseph.com.