RogueAgent

ISSUE 65
CONTENTS

AUGUST 2020

Barbara Kreader Skalinder
Jessica Drake-Thomas
Jenn Avery
Emily Joy Oomen
Breia Gore
ART: J. I. Kleinberg
Nicole Matis
Shannon Hozinec
Rachana Hegde
Paulie Lipman

CONTRIBUTORS

Barbara Kreader Skalinder

GHOST BED

I wake
and tiptoe
like a child

in bare feet
out of the rooms
of our marriage

where you
forced me
to sleep

away the heat
of my life
like my mother

did those
endless
August 

afternoons
I curled up
inside

her depression
and wide-eyed
counted

dust mites
in rhythm
with the shrieks 

and shouts
of friends
at play

outside
the window
until 

one day
in silence
I turned

the door knob
strapped
on her shadow

and fled
into bed
with you.

Jessica Drake-Thomas

RUSSIAN DOLL

I’m opening up, you see:
I unzip my skin so another
version of me steps out.
Each one worse
than before.

None are real,
these women that you see,
they’re mirrors.

For a little while,
I can be whoever
you want me to. 

I’m the woman who dreams vividly
of burning to death.
I wake suddenly, then
catch fire, crackling.
I rise from my own ashes.

When I open my eyes,
I’m still on fire, the shadows
casting strangely on the walls.

Jenn Avery

I AM NOW BINGE EATING

Today’s shameful experience,
distended, halved and still
gourmandized. I am the woe
eater in throes. Throne,
trashed and crumbling around
a living carcass caught in a knuckle
of afterlife. I go on eating. I am
bringing this shovel to the temple,
its infamous sigil inscribed on eager
crevice cornering, the simper,
the wink of opulence
waning only to flicker
open again to eat
these seeds. Seething
almost, but held back at a corridor of hole,
that is so full but vacant.

Emily Joy Oomen

ODE TO THE GIRL NOT ON A DIET
ride on calorie cowgirl

When your frenemy told you that you should eat less sugar
You painted your lips red in response  

Just like that time you didn’t think twice 
When that woman at Whole Foods gave you the side-eye
Because your cart was full of bread and not leafy greens 

Your bloated belly in your tight-fitting cocktail dress is full of no fucks
Sometimes you think it even deserves an Instagram account of its own

You have learned valuable lessons in your non-diet life
Like the force it takes to break through sugar crashes, how much caffeine your body can
Actually handle, and that ice cream can make everything 90% better

On a dinner date when the waitress asks, “what would you like to order?” 
You pull the steak knife from your purse and stab it with a smile and a matter of fact force 
Onto the menu item of pasta instead of salad 

And when the man you’re with comments while you’re eating,
“I like that you’re a girl who eats.”
You slide him the check, take your pasta, and leave.

Breia Gore

COOKING PROCESS

before i plop the raw chicken
into the oil so it can cook and pop
like a dislocated shoulder, 

i coat it three different times
in three different bowls, the order
of egg/milk, flour/garlic powder/pepper/salt, bread crumbs,

but before i coat the raw chicken, i get stoned
on the kitchen floor and say life is beautiful
and giggle and say things like i’m not high, just medicated.

i giggle and say things like i left my bra in the dryer
and the hades in me is tender, and that i’m just waiting
for my psychotic break, and what if the rain was only at my window?

before i get stoned and say all of those things,
i clean the only pan in the house with a dishwag
to plop the raw chicken into.

then i place the pan on the only stove eye that works,
and prepare for the rest. this is meaningful because
last summer there was no appetite at all. and this summer,

i have found something i can do with my hands.

J. I. Kleinberg

IT TURNS OUT

MOTHER

Artist statement:

These visual poems are from an ongoing series of collages built from phrases created unintentionally through the accident of magazine page design. Each contiguous fragment of text, roughly the equivalent of a poetic line, is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax. The text is not altered and includes no attributable phrases. The lines of each collage are, in most cases, sourced from different magazines.

Nicole Matis

STUDENT SCRUBBED IN

Next to surgeon, I stand gowned without arms.
Precaution they say, observers can only be so sterile—

This is what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.
Eyes locked to vertebrae,
close enough to see the snap of spinal cord,
but never quite knowing how that
drill joining
screw joining
seven-layer mesh ought to feel.

Is it better to wear the uniform with a gaping hole?
Is it better to have sleeves or no clothes at all?

I like to think I belong at the table,
that one day I can declare the instruments
mine. It’s not the fatality I fear
but control. How tools kiss bodies
without sound. I worry I can never
be so muffled.

I’m nestled in connective tissue,
shouting notice me—
here between the organ of interest
and the adipose you forget, somehow,
surgery is bigger than the surgical field.

Bigger than me in my corner by the storage closet.
I lift stethoscope to my ears
and press metal disc to overstocked pillows,
listen carefully to arrhythmias in the pillow’s pulse.

Shannon Hozinec

AFTERIMAGE

In the dream, I am stood at a clearing,
a pulse of crows suspended in mid-air

like apple seeds fallen
from the palm of some careless god. 

 A violet buzz in the air hints at things gone hallowed:
saffron blooms with their petals glued shut, a bowl of plump figs,

three lines of powdered hooves, all eager to be taken
into the unknowable murk of our bodies. 

You emerge from the line of trees.  Your hands of stuttering
daybreak, of milkweather and silt, reach toward me.

If we were to speak I fear everything would vanish.

                                    You reach for me, and my makeshift ribs crack open —
one by one.   I walk toward you.   I come to you sundered, I come to you blister-
fixed, I come to you rife with mistake, a constellation of corpses.

You slide your hands so deep within me they disappear, gilding themselves
in my molten belly all the way to the hilt. 

Gold-veined charting of property, I have never felt
                  as treasured as when I am conduit, mongrel so leashed.

I cannot help but think of an ancient story, 

one I remember falling often from the lips of my mother
                  as she wiped my brow free of sweat, as I lie wracked with fever. 

In the story lovers were an inseparable whole, plush and happy,
                  round bodies bloated with fervor, with favor.            

 When they were parted, by God’s sharp and infinite spite, 
they roamed the earth, searching for one another

with extended arm, rotting tendrils of want, until they eventually perished
of hunger, unable to be satisfied by mere promise, panged gullets
                  a symptom of a greater sickness.

                                    My passel — your vessel — our derelict.
What else could I do but embrace you in turn?

We clutch each other as if it is only our nature,

                                    as burrs cling to hair.  What is a dream
                  if not a place where the truth can take root?

I am real only in the places where I feel you
against me.             When I swallow your tongue,

am I keeping or giving a violence?                 

You turn my head.
                  I breathe through your mouth.

Rachana Hegde

IN REMEMBRANCE

I

At dusk, we passed the flickering
of houses wanting to be seen so
they might see themselves,
their doors left ajar for the world
to slip in and stay awhile.

Here were homes longing
to be lived in and 
I could not give them that.

Instead, I looked at them,
preserving them in my memory,
like dragging a brush through
damp clay, a solid prayer
to the people who once stayed
and gave themselves to that
fierce loneliness.

II

The path was ending but it had
taken us this far into another hour
like a stone pitched at the
shimmering square of a window.
Here we were doing a terrible thing or
feeling it done to us. I couldn’t say
which was worse. She told me,
if someone comes for us, run.

III

The stone tumbled onto a rug.
It was misplaced. I felt it,
her grip on my hand.
I’m here, I said. And what good
will that do? How can you
help me? But she moved closer.

IV

 Houses tethered to absence,
to strangers who had lived
not sleeping or eating, as in a book
where each scene is absolute.
Everything else happened without
their knowledge. The house
couldn’t intervene but it imagined
protecting its people from the
blazing blue of the sky above its roof.
After all, death can wait.

V

 Now these houses in ruins are
what we make of them. This blade is
what I make of it. It is only
a question of surviving my own
disappearance. And we have learned
to be brutal with ourselves.
To measure our worth as the space
these houses no longer take up.

VI

Once, I became a home left empty
for too long. She called to me:
What do you need?
But I could not put it into words,
this selfish hope– 
that she would stand here with me,
watching over the houses.

VII

Someday, I will be dead, having
second thoughts about death,
like what if I had waited.
What if I had let her take my hand
and pull me away from those houses
with their awful silence
filling me up as I listened.

VIII

Soon, I will need a house to grieve
my grandfather as if he has died
instead of forgetting us.

IX

His door stays open. I come home and
I cannot close it. I should not have come.
The house blames me. The stone
in my hand trembles. It is not enough
to love someone who no longer exists.

Paulie Lipman

EXTERNUS, PATRON SAINT OF BEATMAKERS

How do you
de/cipher a
language
that never
passes over
a tongue
but speaks
directly to
the body?

You can’t | diagram| a sentence
\
when | it | has | been
\
s m a s h e d 

  and
reassembled

with
no

regard
for
grammar

our instruments
don’t exist in
physical space
therefore meta
reality defined
as ghosts for rhythm
circuits as seance
past resurrect to
light the present
clearly enough
to strike fear
into the pharisees

so
imagine our confusion
when (seldom)
truthsayers insist
on calling us

outliers

when we honestly
hardly see daylight
except when we
upchuck 2 minutes
to midnight
transcribe our guts
push on until the
dawn’s breaking
and sample
the sun

Our drums
shake loose
false idols in
sine wave
gospel
call forth
pay tribute
to the ancients
and echo the
coming of
a new kind
of faith
where there
are no gods
only
congregation

Issue 65 Contributors

Jenn Avery lives in New England and writes fantasy fiction, poetry, and academic essays and books. She enjoys wildcraft, sacred movement, dragon riding, and raising strong girls.

Jessica Drake-Thomas is a poet, fiction writer, and blogger. She's the author of a gothic horror poetry collection, Burials. 

Breia Gore is an Asian-American writer and community organizer living in Colorado with her three cats and human partner. She is pursuing an MFA, is editor-in-chief of The Honey Mag, and author of Leo, Hovering (Bottlecap Press). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and can be found in Glitter Mob, Electric Moon Magazine, Thirty West Publishing, Katitikan, and more. When she isn't being a little punk or writing about her southern roots, she can be found freelancing and online @gorebreia.

Rachana Hegde is an 20 year old Indian writer from Hong Kong. Her poetry has appeared in DIALOGIST, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Reservoir, and Diode. Find her at www.rachanahegde.weebly.com.

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, PA and loves expensive whiskey, cheap port, and long, romantic walks to the bar.  Her work has been published in Thrush, The Adroit Journal, Birdfeast, The Hunger, and elsewhere.  

Twice nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards, J. I. Kleinberg is an artist, poet, and freelance writer. Her poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she tears words out of magazines and posts occasionally on Instagram @jikleinberg.

Paulie Lipman is a former bartender/bouncer/record store employee/Renaissance Fair worker/two time National Poetry Slam finalist and a current loud Jewish/Queer/ poet/writer/performer. His work has appeared in Button Poetry, Write About Now, The Emerson Review, Drunk In A Midnight Choir, Voicemail Poems, pressure gauge, Protimluv (Czech Republic) and Prisma: Zeitblatt Fur Text & Sprache (Germany). Their poetry collections "from below/denied the light" and "sad bastard soundtrack" are available from Swimming With Elephants Publications.  Contact Info: paulielipman@gmail.com.

Nicole Matis is a recent graduate from the University of Tennessee and currently a first-year medical student at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine. Her work has appeared in Cheat River Review, Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society’s Forum, and Stirring.

Emily Joy Oomen is a journalist and multi-media poet. Her work has been featured in venues that range from the Athens International Video Poetry Festival to Vice to Entropy Magazine, among others. Her current work-in-progress is a full-length manuscript, titled Artificial/Reality, which explores artificiality and reality in this digital age. You can find her on Instagram @poetic_espresso.  

Barbara Kreader Skalinder is a poet and musician whose poems resonate with the songs the world sings, be they hallelujahs or dirges. She holds a Writer's Certificate from The Graham School of the University of Chicago where she won a Student Writer's Prize.  Her poems have been published in various journals including Rhino, Persimmon Tree, Split This Rock, Mayday, Open: The Journal of Arts and Letters, and After Hours.  She is a founding member of Plumb Line Poets.