RogueAgent

ISSUE 78
CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 2021

Lisa Marie Oliver
Judy Kaber
Jeffrey Bean
Kyleigh Graham
Michelle Askin
Kara Lewis
Leigh Camacho Rourks
Votey Cheav
Dion O’Reilly
Caitlin Cowan

CONTRIBUTORS

Lisa Marie Oliver

BODY AS DESERT STAR MAP

Face shape  Auriga    charioteer

a sky-crossing      a desert    body loose

with heat    and Lepus radiant like    heart

muscles   desert rabbit    warm brown hide

the color of ground   nebula      Dog Star

of umbilical plain      Pleiades       mouth

Canus Major   brainstem      and cacti bend      

towards       and Joshua Trees       arch east

Judy Kaber

OLD BODIES

Chests press together.
Legs shift, find space.

My hand follows an old path— 
the groove of his back—from
shoulder to sweet curve below,
bears the day’s scent.

I think of what I will become 
later in a box tucked in white-branched clay.

Each day I lift my face
to the sun, carry its heat with me—
a censor, grief, happiness.

Like the spruce tree, I bear the breeze.
Like the tree, the wind batters me.

The world will etch me in ink,
but that’s a vain thought. It knows
nothing of me. I am no more than
pebbles or a rain-flecked stream.

There are no keys here, no locks,
no doors, only

the heat we generate, the wet tongued
moments that glide through
bruised and yearning days.

Jeffrey Bean

CHRONIC

The pain like a mouth on my neck.
Deep blue, a little purple, in the gut
and at the side, like a false left arm
made of rust, like a white bird above
a gem-green sea. The pain like a tall,
glass pitcher of ice, a cold piece

of fruit stuck in the teeth. The pain
like a pine wreath, coiled and fragrant.
Like an old man leaning on a porch rail,
shading his eyes, not moving toward his rake.
The pain like a lake. A loon out of earshot.
A hand that grips and grips, a long night

of snowfall plugging roads, snuffing
windows, piano music on an old,
yellow radio, the same two notes
over and over. And me at the window
watching headlights through icicles, 
memorizing the gleam. 

Kyleigh Graham

ONE OF THESE DAYS, I HOPE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL WILL TAKE ROOT

I flattened my curls —
To assimilate to the species of American Girl.

Something inside was sliced.
A spice esteemed overseas felt impelled to water-down, self-sacrifice.

My bulletin board is immortalized—  
A shrine to a sprightly specimen who has grown extinct.

A feminine fossil who once led her peers in song atop double-decker buses.
And tossed toffee to strangers on the tube.

I have never felt at home—  
Birds build nests in foreign lands.

My ballpoint pen worth ten years of toil just ran out of ink,
So, I washed my hair.

Michelle Askin

HAVEN

Early dawn wandering but not after a night shift.
These wasted hands have forgotten how to labor years ago.
Have forgotten how to heal the wounds of the wailing
in the hospitals, the lonely cries in the therapeutic
disguised names of the last sanitoriums.
Still my faraway Lord grants me this goodness,
the dreamy lush shrubbery leaking through
the rusty red fences untouched since 1978
in the neighborhood of a tan and russet English cottage
style homes, somehow feeling a bit more urban
than the almost scrapers of sky across the bridge.
But what do I know about cities and architecture?
Everything in my wandering is just for me to pass
through, to touch the world for what I cannot
touch in you. I want to be made holy again.
I want to go back to the basilica and remember
the begging, to remember that there was a time
before rain when God made wetness well from deep
within the bowels of the earth to water this new dream
of the living. And the gardens are beginning to bloom
again. So lush they are almost the floral patterns
of Arabesques, that vivid blue and watery pink
of the Mediterranean in the sunrise they were
shipped off on, to be the new faraway teaching
of beauty. And a thousand years ago, you wouldn’t
have known my name. A thousand years from now,
our galaxies might cry out to one another
with the endless trembles of hurt, and then,
just a memory to be heard by those in a different time,
different frequency. Echoing of an I lost you friend.
I lost you for a  very long time. And radio signals,
radio signals, or whatever way love is still listened to.

Kara Lewis

GARDEN ABECEDARIAN

Alice was the first name I gave to what would invade, what I believed would
bud inside me. I pronounced it in French, watering a hint that in this
country where cribs glint like trellises and rabbits bite anything ripe, I could never have a
daughter. In the parking lot where asphalt birthed black cohosh, a man pointed to his
eight year old, asked, So, would you shoot her? The fetus in his picture unfurled like the reddest
flower. In the center, something female swelling, called a pistil. I have uncocked an engorged
gynoecium at the gynecologist, ovaries overgrown and cysts blossoming like bullets.
How will we get to the root of this? Asked the doctors, my gown slicked with blood or mud,
I stopped telling the difference. I said, In ancient Greek, gyn means wife.
Just like paperwork asks a husband’s opinion, I never found a plant beautiful until reproduction.
Killer. Monster. Black thumb. When I lifted the wilting laceleaf toward my lover, I wanted him to
laugh at what I killed. Like the game night where the card that said Shouldn’t have kids landed in
my pile. The room as cold as ultrasound goo that once covered my stomach, my friend said,
No offense. I mean, look at your succulent. What I kill makes me quirky, crowns me not like
other girls. At the farmer’s market, I caught my lover gazing at a seedling, a perennial
premonition of how he will leave me. I tell him about Alices and other things long extinct,
quiet bedtime stories about how when we draw hearts, we’re actually drawing silphium seeds.
Really, what’s inside us is too ugly to be any kind of aphrodisiac,
so we reach for what’s ancient. I wanted him to bring me wildflowers in a vase, to say, I will
tear up the earth for you. I will pluck what you love from its mother and deliver it
uprooted. Every time I feel rootless, unblooming, I Google search
variegation, how disease unfurls in coveted flecks of yellow and
white. At Lowe’s, I asked, What if I forget to water? My
xerarch daughter, I’d find you in the desert, next to a crashed plane and a lonely prince. I’d find
you on another planet. Teach me how to be that tall, that hardy, your
zealousness reaching toward a sunset that only we can see.

Leigh Camacho Rourks

SWIM, IT SAID
—For Elizabeth Joy Levinson and all the Ocean Girls

When I was a child, my heart beat unfettered
untopped, uncaged, my body bronzed and bleached, unshirted,
unencumbered, unashamed. I was an ocean girl, a swimmer, unsexed
and unafraid. I knew the smell of salt on skin as washed and clean, flesh un
interrupted, unburdened, unspooled, atoms free

                                                            to roam and return, to sail, unassailed.

My heart is still hot and gritted. Sand, like love or pain, gets everywhere. Even
in deep chambers, it sits and calls to the sun and the ocean, refuses to wash
free. It is glass unborn, unafraid of reflection. Unrefracted, yet. Direction always
seaward, unwavering, the blood of an ocean girl.

                                                            Yesterday, my heart stopped beating

or I stopped beating it down. It grew fins and flashed, glinting
sunward. And I bared my breast, my chest, my ribs, my scaled skin, keratosis—
the doctor said, “Do you sunbathe topless?” and I said no, not knowing why I’d
become topped. The skin there thickened anyway, and my heart knew this change
was no disease, I am a fish thing it screamed,

                                                            Its silvered dorsal sharp against sternum.

And it escaped. It is always escaping me, now that I sit so still, suited
and well suited for a life off an island, unfreckled toes, heals uncalloused
and unscathed, unmade. This skin thinned and rippling longing, 
as if need is a thing with gentle mass, weight sufficient to skip slip
shift, to slide, to tear, to rip and leave hole enough

                                                                                    to swim.

Votey Cheav

SCISSOR TALK

My mother chides
and constantly reminds me
to find a husband.

That if I find a man
suitable enough
for marriage,
to chop him up
before he can realize it.

Translated loosely
from her trite
Cambodian tongue
she tells me to:

cut off             
his head
cut off
his tail

and you’re left
with just
the body.

No mouth to speak
no legs to run away
just the heart that feels.

What would she think
if she knew that
I’ve severed many men,
and still no takers?

Dion O’Reilly

WHAT IT TOOK

It made sense flames licked my skin off
the year I turned twenty.

Made sense my life narrowed to growth of new skin,
grafted from scraps of my unburnt self.

Made sense that I looked at my claws, black as used matches,
saw only fingers waiting to re-wrap in skin.

It made sense my mother learned to journey
back and forth twice a day,

tortuous climb and steep descent through the coastal range
to a burn unit where I smelled like band aids and blood.

Her life became nothing but watching
the blue of my eyes roll into darkness. Nothing

but listening to the shudder of my teeth
as they bloodied the tip of my tongue.

I became her baby again, gauze wrapped, just my face visible,
neck vein tapped for morphine like an umbilical.

Each day, when she walked through the burn ward doors,
did she remember the night I emerged from her wet darkness

before she ever lifted my skin with a lunge whip? 

She watched, hands folded, as my salts leaked out
from my unskinned back and legs. Watched

as the white-gowned nurses rushed to fill me
with whatever mineral my heart needed.

She watched the way mothers watch their babies— 
till their eyes burn.

Caitlin Cowan

TO MY LITTLE SELF

Remember the cookies            just two or three          castled in the little glass

dish glinting in Michigan’s sorry       excuse for sun             you were seven and went back

for more     two or three     when Mama came back from the deck she scolded        what

was it that she said          does it matter          what matters is that you waited at the kitchen

counter for an hour after she went back     outside the sky slowly darkening      you would not

disappoint her no              you were seven years old              if you did not eat them you

were good           you would make her see you were good          I’m here to tell you to eat them

and everything else life will offer     the bitter men and sweet             distractions to come

eat it all            none of it matters           you will never be good      you do not have to be good

one day that tattoo will grace the skin         behind your clavicle your little black       rebellion

it got so dark that Mama came back inside      saw the bowl the untouched wafers       said

what did she say           what matters is that she chided you            again you had fucked up

it’s ok        we can say that now        the earth spun the sad       Midwestern sky to sludge and you

have never forgotten that day even     as your waistline surged and ebbed       a fleshy tide

you will never be able to harness         it’s ok      I’m here to tell you there are larger wrongs and you

will commit them all devour      them all and life will go on the world       will keep on spinning

the sun neither rises nor sets it’s just you        baby girl         turning          and turning

Issue 78 Contributors

Michelle Askin’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in 34th Parallel Magazine, GNU Journal, Raleigh Review, Pif Magazine, Penmen Review, Whimsical Poet: A Journal Of Contemporary Poetry, and elsewhere. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She lives in Northern Virginia.

Jeffrey Bean is Professor of English/Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. His poems have appeared in the journals The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, River Styx, The Laurel Review, and Willow Springs, among others, and online at Poets.org and Verse Daily. He is author of two chapbooks and the poetry collections Diminished Fifth (2009) and Woman Putting on Pearls (2017), which won the 2016 Red Mountain Poetry Prize. www.jeffreybeanpoet.com

Votey Cheav’s poetry has appeared in Postscript Magazine, Montana Mouthful, and Floresta Magazine. She is a Cambodian-American daughter of refugees who survived the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. She is a trained lawyer and lover of the human condition and is interested in the collective consciousness, in the moments and memories that evoke awakening in each of us.

Caitlin Cowan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English and has taught writing at the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Pleiades and serves as the Chair of Creative Writing at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Caitlin writes regularly at PopPoetry.

Kyleigh Graham is an emerging writer from Bryn Mawr, PA. She is a May 2020 graduate of Penn State University, where she studied advertising, public relations, and Spanish. Currently, she works as a supply chain associate in the financial services industry. Kyleigh has been writing poetry throughout her life and is thrilled to finally share her work.

Judy Kaber is the current Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, as well as the author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have previously appeared in Rogue Agent and as well as other noteworthy publications.

Kara Lewis is a poet, writer, and editor based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in SWWIM, Pithead Chapel, Stirring, and elsewhere. She is a weekly contributor to the Read Poetry vertical, as well as a poetry reader for Longleaf Review.

Lisa Marie Oliver’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Book of Matches, Windfall, FERAL, and Literary Mama. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dion O’Reilly has spent most of her life on a small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her debut book, Ghost Dogs, (Terrapin Books 2020) was runner up in the Catamaran Poetry Prize and has since won several prizes. Her work appears in American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts, radio shows, and events. These days, she facilitates ongoing Zoom workshops with small groups of poets from all over the United States and Canada. (dionoreilly.wordpress.com)

Leigh Camacho Rourks is a Cuban-American author from South Louisiana, who is an Assistant Professor at Beacon College in Central Florida. She won the St. Lawrence Book Award for her debut story collection, Moon Trees and Other Orphans. She is also the recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Booth, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.