RogueAgent

ISSUE 60
CONTENTS

MARCH 2020


Sarah Nichols
Elaine Cannell
Thomas Mixon
Calida Osti
Ricky Garni
James A. Miller
Meghan Sterling
Richelle Buccilli
Anna Antongiorgi
Jessica Lynne Furtado

CONTRIBUTORS

Elaine Cannell

MY CHRONIC PAIN AS TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY LITERARY HEROINE

my chronic pain is an orphan
& origins matter here.
     my chronic pain
has soft hands but
works hard; she scrubs
     the floors with a rough
brush.
my chronic pain wakes early & cracks
fresh eggs for her bachelor
uncle’s breakfast. she
wears plain clothes,
      obeys her elders,
believes in god,
braids her flaxen hair each night.
   my chronic pain has
never been taught
any different. she
says her prayers kneeling by the bed.
    my chronic pain
hurts me, & the reader
never learns why.       
this mystery
    makes her provocative,
     like that
tastefully
           revealing
bodice,     or
  the delicate way she
moves on the dance floor,
    her natural perfume
intoxicating
  the general’s son, whom
she can never marry.
my chronic
pain laughs, &            
it twinkles
   like
so
many
bells,
but none of the men in town
understand her. you see,
my chronic pain is     
a romantic. she believes in
the waiting,
the  s l o w waltz,
    the grand
denouement.
        her favorite flower is the
     forget-me-not, because my
chronic pain is less subtle
     than you’d think.  
in the end, a
significant dowry
may be uncovered,
an honorable bloodline,
a father
long
thought
    lost.
in the end, perhaps
     she’ll wear
a grand dress,
in a grand house     
filled with
     roses & chandeliers.
in the end, perhaps
my chronic pain
will overcome great
adversity, but
where
will she
leave me?

Thomas Mixon

DIAGNOSIS

Would I order the unnecessary
thousands of X-ray images, tacked up
along a long enough wall, unfractured
bone next to unfractured bone, all joining
together to calcify what we owe
ourselves: the discovery in the end
picture: the anomaly we may have
overlooked, veiled by probability?

Errant shadows from a child’s mobile
punctuate what the doctor doesn’t say.

Ricky Garni

CANDID CAMERA

People love to ask “What person in history
would you like to invite over for dinner?”
and I always have the same answer:
my corpse.

James A. Miller

THE CLASP

Let me take your wine glass.
I’ll wash both out, wipe down
our soup bowls. We share 

two squares of salted chocolate.
You’re looking over a recipe
for Bloomsbury cake, cut off 

midway through the second
stirring. Work out what
to do with eggs, honey,

nutmeg. Pour that thickness
into waxed cups, then wait. 
Do you know, I have been

out collecting hymns, or rather
their strange names? When I am
alone in the house, I sometimes

wander across the piano keys,
and the melody slows to near-
nothing. It grows and glints,

slips skinless. You lift
your hair. I draw up the clasp
on your black dress.

Meghan Sterling

BIRD BONES

Not right, this body:
wide-waisted, triangular,
legs hemmed in by hips jointed
like clothespins clipped to thin rope.
I swore, I knew, I would remake it,
eating air and wine, growing light
as birdsong, milk thistle seed soft
and blown. The Folks loved this
thin new thing carried by winds,
swift and small, the big-breasted demon
Womanhood passing me over,
sexless and translucent,
a door prize for the loss of children
grown and gone. And all the while,
the blood stopped coming, and instead
came from teeth, the tongue’s
graying cover, skin getting loose.
Something grows, and another thing
diminishes. Something so bright
you couldn't see how dim.
Look, how beautiful!
we would say with reverence
as a woman darted past,
quivering on bird legs, her beak
clamped closed.
I felt the hungry stares of approval
as my stick figure skated around
tables where I wouldn’t eat,
a heart stopped like a clock,
all my passion spent on the bones left  
that I could gnaw and gnaw.

Richelle Buccilli

BOILER ROOM

I remember the first time your anger turned
you into a new culture,
a new race.

I didn’t know the language.

You yelled things I couldn’t understand,
things I couldn’t translate back.

I stood in the corner of the dining room,
my underwear soaked from my own pee,

your yell entered my veins,
the control of my body gone.

I saw your skin turn to flaming red,

and I thought
I wish I were someone else.

I almost took the pistol of your scream
and aimed in the opposite direction.

.
.
.

That night by the fireplace I held my knees like pillows,
searched for something behind the flames
that swayed like widows’ scarves.

You said it was my turn to throw the wood:
silently I did,

silently
I listened to the crackles and whips.

Anna Antongiorgi

ANOTHER POEM ENDING IN A PLEA

My stomach feels like it might wrap
around itself. I’ve been treating my

body like trauma, as if it hasn’t been
too good to me always. I am sorry

to my knees, for the bruising,
for the over trust in gravity and the

false anatomy of Russian ballet teachers.
I’m sorry to the bottoms of my scapula,

how much hate has directed itself and
monumented there, so many shifts

in sports bra, tentacle, flesh mesh
massage. I’m sorry to my ribs, I’ve used

them as some kind of measurement,
they’ve fueled pain and the wish to

be an almost anti-feminist. I have
mistakenly ruined the tissue, bone,

and seed. Please reverse into that exhale,
make soft the landing of the song, and

pray with me: Dear God, let me be
better tomorrow.

Jessica Lynne Furtado

SELF-PORTRAIT AS OWL

The mask is feathered copper,
gold fringe – a wing over forehead
like a mother’s temperature test.
I prop the tripod in its architect’s
stance, set the camera timer
for ten seconds. It’s the mad dash
to pose before the pursed lip
of shutter opens – swallows whole
the decade packed into burst
moment. In this fairytale I am
a bird without the talons,
an actress whose audience bows
only to wind. How wild a thing
that learns to be a woman –
a woman that learns to turn
her head in all directions. 

Issue 60 Contributors

Anna Antongiorgi is a writer, choreographer, and dancer originally from Redondo Beach, California. A member of the Harvard Class of 2019, she graduated cum laude in English. Her work has been featured in the Dying Dahlia Review and the Inquisitive Eater. She is currently working toward her MFA in Creative Writing at the New School while pursuing dance and choreography in New York City. She is on Instagram @embodiedpoetry.

Richelle Buccilli is currently working on her first manuscript, and her poems have previously appeared in Yawp, Girls with Glasses, Wicked Alice, Mad Swirl, and Eye Contact. She earned a Creative Writing degree and teaching certifications from Seton Hill University, and she lives in Pittsburgh with her husband Frank and their one-year-old son Roman. 

Elaine Cannell is a poet and PhD student studying feminist literature and performance art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Ghost City Review, Pretty Owl Poetry and After Hours.

Jessica Lynne Furtado is a poet, photographer, & librarian. Her visual work has been featured in Muzzle Magazine, Pretty Owl Poetry, & Waxwing, and her writing has appeared in apt, Spry, & Stirring. Her debut chapbook A Kiss for the Misbehaved is forthcoming from BatCat Press. Visit Jess at www.jessicafurtado.com.

Ricky Garni works as a graphic designer for a regional wine company and staff photographer for Horse & Buggy Press (Durham, NC), a gallery and design studio that uses a nifty 19th century letterpress for many of their publications. 

James A. Miller is a native of Houston, Texas.  His poems have appeared in Sweet Tree Review, Cold Mountain Review, The Maine Review, Lullwater Review, Lunch Ticket, Gravel, Main Street Rag, Verdad, Juked, The Write Launch, The Shore, Menacing Hedge, Califragile, Meat for Tea, The Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.

Thomas Mixon was a featured writer at Mass Poetry's U35 reading series in Boston. His work has appeared in Breadcrumbs, MockingHeart Review, Plainsongs, and elsewhere.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly, 2018.) Her poems and essays can also be found in Ghost City Review, Drunk Monkeys, and Five:2:One Magazine.

Calida Osti is a poet and writer from Georgia currently writing in Indiana. She has an MFA from Lindenwood University and has served as an editorial assistant for The Lindenwood Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Better Than Starbucks, The Midwest Quarterly, misfitmagazine.net, Plainsongs, Sugared Water, WINK, Willawaw Journal, and Writers Resist. Say hello on Twitter @rawr_lida or by visiting www.calidaosti.com.

Meghan Sterling lives in Portland, Maine with her family. She is co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, out in winter, 2019 at littoralbooks.com. Her work has been published in Rattle, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Driftwood Press, the Sandy River Review, Sky Island Journal, and others.  She is a poetry reader for the Maine Review,  Featured Poet in Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 issue, and completed a Hewnoaks Artists' Colony Residency in September, 2019. Her work can be found at meghansterling.com.