RogueAgent

ISSUE 67
CONTENTS

OCTOBER 2020

Sheila Dong
Rita Feinstein
Alina Stefanescu
Kristy Bowen
Poppy Rosales
Suzanne Richardson
Evan Williams
Jessie Pocock
Ginna Luck
Rebecca Poynor

CONTRIBUTORS

Sheila Dong

STRIDULATION

every year crickets
patronize my bedroom.
the deeper the summer,
the faster they chirp.
like them, i rub myself
against myself to make me
sing, have wings lined
with teeth and arpeggios
under the last layer
of my clothes. the song
drips down like silver
filings. unlike the insects,
i do this not to catch
a mate, but stay whole
without one. it’s the crickets
i’m sad for, how they blister
from their friction, burn
their wings from fear of dying
alone. but i don’t worry
about myself. i hold me
like a high note.

Rita Feinstein

THE GOD OF YOUR OWN THINNESS

You draw The Tower—
its crown shattered
by barb-tailed lightning,
its black windows
weeping embers.
Your ample-breasted
goddess tarot deck
is supposed to give you
something to read
besides nutrition facts,
something to believe
when you’ve been
flickering in and out
of faith in the god
of your own thinness,
but the tower’s on fire
and you’re the one
throwing the lightning.
You’ve created a religion
and you are your own
human sacrifice.
Everyone who sees you
starts to pray.

Alina Stefanescu

SWEETNESS OF ALABAMA FEMME

Our cup overfloweth
with avid

hygiene-enforcement
officers who shame

the single mother
frying their burger

for her failure to freesia,
petunia, gardenia. 

I remember being
fifteen and surprised

by the scent of warm biscuits
creeping out from under

my armpits. And my friends
distinguished by their

personal version of Teen Spirit,
the soft pressure to smell 

like something inhuman.
Will you hate me if confess

I love it? And that I skip
deodorant to sink deep

into this body's most
human emanations--

that it was a damn miracle
when my mom lifted

her blood-soaked pad to my face
and said THIS is the

scent of soil after rain,
this is the origin of roses.

Kristy Bowen

FROM PELT

The dog-girl plays croquet in the afternoon. Lays out her skirts on the lawn.  At dawn, crawled into this other skin. Removed the moonlight and replaced it with lace binding.  There was all that time winding, the maids with their whispers.   Girls without mothers are windswept, full of cobwebs.  Morally ambiguous as frosted cakes growing stale on the plate.  The dog-girl tastes them all and licks the sticky icing from her fingers, one by one.  It's frightening, how easily she slips into cracks. Just yesterday, a whole day gone and her naked in the woods, sleeping.   How she stood and brushed the leaves from her hair. Slipped into her crinolines like nothing had happened. 

Poppy Rosales

FLOWER ASKING THE DOCTOR QUESTIONS

      what do I wonder?

 if I let my lungs grow
roots would it kill me?

and if I didn’t trim my
grassy legs, would boys
not want to touch me?

      what do I wonder?

if you opened me up,
would their fingerprints
caress my spine?

would his drawings of
me leave lead-stains
between my ribs?

would you notice?

      what do I wonder?

if you opened me up,
would you pick things
off my garden body like
they belonged to you?

like they belonged to them?

is that why, when I’m
nervous, it is bees that fly
around in my stomach?

they sting me
and remind me that nothing
good ever comes from him.

from her.
from clasping hands.

from her arms reaching out
to save me – she did this, too.

      what do I wonder?

is this why the bees fly
around in my stomach?

remind me that nothing
good ever happens to people
who sleep in houses that
are as dirty as my own.

remind me
            dear old bees—

Suzanne Richardson

SEX DURING SOCIAL DISTANCING

My hair smells like shampoo but there is no

one here to smell it. I am told to sex a shadow. It is

safer than sexing you. I am told to

love a pixel it is round and in the shape of

you. I am told to buy liquor and a gun. If this never

ends—an escape. I am on a journey;

not a physical one, or maybe it is.  I am still

here. Sixty days. I am waiting. I need to be touched.

My pussy tastes like pussy, but 

there is no one here to taste it. Cake batter too dangerous
 
to eat. It is spring and leaves are coming out of me

so shiny and tender like baby bat wings. It’s 

 the worst time to try to love someone, and yet, here I am—I

stay up at night vomit-coughing, but I want you.

Turn down the music. Turn on the news. 

The dead are wrapped; piled, like grocery store bouquets. Each day

a new level of decay. Each day, a new telegenic message.

A dead mouse called pneumonia sleeps in my chest. Lobes 

infected. My lungs the pink of worms. Full flower Scorpio moon watching.

Spring virus bursting. The garden only grows rubber gloves.
      
If the economy collapses before my lungs please 

tell me you want me. That’s how close I want to be to you. So close,

you replicate me, shed me, spread me, leave traces of me every

place. Don’t put on a mask yet. I still want to see your 

face. I am told to make my body still. Shelter. Cover. Sleep. But I.

Can still dream. Fuck me like a lake. Fuck me awake. It’s not

wrong. You will enter the coldness of my body, cold 

from distance, infection, isolation, lack of connection. Sex me warm

again. Boil me. Plug in. They say; don’t break quarantine. Don’t.

Break quarantine. Break. Quarantine. Break. The president 

said we could. I am supposed to see the violence of your body

but all I hear is music, or is that a siren? I am used to masks now,

but I can’t get off. I take a picture of a picture of my naked

body and send it, so it doesn’t hurt you. Did you finish? Did I? Can

we get there? Are we nowhere? Our orgasm lost in outer space soup? I feel

a rug, I feel the chair, I feel the floor. I married my couch. Only

 intimate with objects now. Only safe with objects. I am a human who

only interacts with the weather now. Every breath is a threat. Clorox

a park bench. Tonight, I can barely stand it, the idea
 

that something you touched could kill me. The ghost of touch haunting

me to death. I break down. I call you on the phone to

describe my perfume: My breasts smell like Charlotte English

roses. Don’t you want to kiss them? The sound of your breath deep

and toxic— you’re on a ventilator. Pleural effusion.

You say: I can smell your lungs from here.

Evan Williams

LIVING AT HOME, MY TELEOLOGICAL CLOSET

I've been withered corpse, dry-                      skinned face with removed-crabapple cheeks.

Gallery gaunt and gorgeous, yes,                    I've seen my sewn-up-open-casket-corpus

in the mirror. He builds my body back                       piece by piece: rope-thick muscles,

lethal reasoning of movement                         accompanied by plastic-army-man-arms.

He holds my mouth open and feeds me                     from hunger. I eat and eat

I grow and grow until I am legion                   until he is happy and I am afraid

until G.I. Joe bows to my virility                   until I am forced to eat myself.

Jessie Pocock

HETERO

Coupling was like this for years -
you didn’t kiss.
Go into the desert.
Climb cactuses.
Wrap your body around a cholla.
Open your mouth to a red or yellow bloom.
And eat the flower like that.
One full bite.
Swallow without chewing.
Petals combing your esophagus.
Lining your stomach.
Tearing through your bowels.

HOMO

There are so many things you need to say.
How your hands curl under another’s.
How you rip your clothing threads off.
How contemplative shedding can be. 

How you have a mind made of fire.
Fire never rests.
Your mind splits in the morning and rejoins in the
afternoon as a different person.
How in another life you burned at the stake for your desire.
You lit fire for love.
Till it burned you to the ground.

How you still wanted.
Found your ribs capsized.
Lungs full of another.
How you’ve wanted to quit your job
since you met them.
How you wanted their body
by the river
or sunset.
When you understood birthright.

Ginna Luck

I AM NERVOUS TO BE THE ONLY ONE BEING LOOKED AT

A nightbird through the murder wind comes in the dark beneath the clouds we dreamed up ourselves and approaches our burnt and weedy great structure of apartness. A light goes on above an empty drink. The sunk stank and silt shit shines in the moonlight. The bird is no bigger than my fist. It whims and turns and ropes. I have always been separate from my anger, my beauty, my weariness. I hear the giant trees talking through a wire fence. I feel two eyes like pennies between my teeth.

Rebecca Poynor

AT SIXTEEN

I feel the burn of it on my skin for the first time at sixteen.
The buzz of the needle against my bone.
The artist blots blood from my ribcage and I itch
to touch the raised flesh where she draws.
She doesn’t ask me about the tattoo (they never do).
I go home with a galaxy beneath my breast,
a bandage rubbing the edge of my bra. 

The Andromeda Galaxy is racing towards the Milky Way
at Mach 400. She will tear it to shreds.
The black hole at the center of our galaxy will fight back
and humanity will die at the collision point, before their war begins.

The artist doesn’t ask questions, but my mother does
when she sees that tattoo in an examination room through
the front opening of my slate gray hospital gown.
How? Why that?
I want to say
Because everything is killed by something eventually.
But her eyes are already edged with tears, so I answer halfway
and tell her I swiped my sister’s license.

The sun will expand and kill humanity
before Andromeda has the chance, I think.
Like the doctors, the scientists keep changing their minds
on life expectancy. I miss
the burning. I miss deciding.
Two weeks later, the sun is burning on my shoulder
in wisps of raised black ink.
Eventually my mom’s questions stop coming around.

I prefer the scratch, get the stab instead.
Needles hurt differently when they’re in my veins.
I want to rip the IV out
of the back of my hand. I can feel it pressing
on my bone. Abstract ideas of death felt better
than the weight of the tumor in my breast tissue.
Anesthesia is cold in my veins and it fills me.
I fall asleep in waves.

When I wake up I feel empty
where it was. Later, a nurse says some of it is left behind.
Three days later I’m still on OxyContin, lying
on a tattoo artist’s table, relishing in the feeling
The burn, the buzz, the needle on my skin, against my bone.
I go home with a gamma ray burst behind my ear.
Neutron stars could collide any time.
I wouldn’t even see it coming.

Issue 67 Contributors

A writer and book artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of a number of chapbooks, artist books, and zine projects as well as the recent SEX & VIOLENCE (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).  She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio. 

Sheila Dong lives in Tucson, AZ. Their writing has appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Old Pal, Arcturus, Moonsick Magazine, and other places. Sheila's chapbook Moon Crumbs was published in 2019 with Bottlecap Press. In their spare time, Sheila reads poetry for Random Sample Review, watches too much television, and collects examples of oddly specific or otherwise humorous closed captions.

Rita Feinstein is the author of the poetry chapbook Life on Dodge (Brain Mill Press, 2018). Her stories and poems have appeared in Permafrost, Grist, and Willow Springs, among other publications, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. She is a graduate of Oregon State University's MFA program.

Ginna Luck’s poems have appeared in Radar Poetry, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Rust + Moth, Leveler Poetry, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and others. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She received her MFA from Goddard College. Her first full-length collection is from Finishing Line Press. She lives, teaches, and writes in Seattle with her family and two dogs.

Jessie Pocock (she/her) was born and raised on the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She received her BA from Colorado College and MPA from the University of Colorado. She is a poet and works as a full-time queer activist directing a community center for queer youth.

Rebecca Poynor grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. She is an emerging writer and M.F.A candidate in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Currently, Rebecca lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Suzanne Richardson earned her MFA in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Utica, New York where she teaches English and creative writing at Utica College. More about Suzanne and her writing can be found here:  https://www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/ You can follow her on Twitter: @oozannesay.

Poppy Rosales is a recent graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy. She’s received recognition from Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for creative writing and photography, including a Silver Medal with Distinction Portfolio Award. She has a nonfiction publication in Scholastic’s Best Teen Writing 2020, and an upcoming poetry publication in Dishsoap Quarterly. 

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several mammals. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter, Co-Founder of 100,000 Poets for Change Birmingham, and proud board member of Magic City Poetry Festival. She was nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes by various journals in 2019. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. She still can't believe (or deserve) any of this. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Evan Williams is an undergraduate at The University of Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Heavy Feather Review, and Fourteen Poems, among others. He can be found on Instagram and Twitter @evansquilliams.