RogueAgent

ISSUE 80
CONTENTS

NOVEMBER 2021

Kierstin Bridger
Halsey Hyer
Louisa Schnaithmann
Chelsea Fanning
Justin Goodman
Tamiko Dooley
Cyndie Randall
J.B. Stone
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Leah Mueller

CONTRIBUTORS

Kierstin Bridger

ROUGH RECORDER

Close your eyes, they said, picture yourself small. A smooth but marked limb appears. You set your fingers on the bruises of the child’s arm. Don’t worry it’s your body, the nesting doll of you, the smallest of you, you can remember.  Do they play like notes on the instrument of skin and bone? Inhale deep, there’s cedar inside, near the center of hurt. Oh, hummingbird heart, the beat of your wings is so fast. Let’s slow it down-- a frame by frame replay-- perhaps the moment your eyes widened in fear then closed slowly into wince. This slow-motion recoil, this stop-time is a study of gesture. We are safe outside our body, so removed we’re cool to the touch. That’s why we can reach for the marks, fingers of feather light, and place the whorl of our printed fingertip on a map of an old melody. It is tinny and corroded. Do you remember that song? Listen hard, there is an accompaniment, a crackle and a buzz, sometimes it skips. It’s a rutted black licorice disk, hard and shiny. It is a hypnotic circle of phonograph whine. Lean-in to hear the strained breath, the reedy tune of our skeleton. Shhhhh, we’re recording. This memoir, noir, this is slow music.

Halsey Hyer

BOY GOOGLES BODY
after Camonghne Felix

                                                            bottom; growth; ftm

dht; cream; testosterone

                                                            high; sex; drive

hair; loss; tincture

                        voice; training; tenor

diy; transition; endocrinology

                                                            trans; man; singers

top; surgery; cost

                                                ftm; porn; reddit

            dad; gives; birth            

                        will; people; still; love; me

will; i; love; me

Louisa Schnaithmann

MAJOR DEPRESSION WITH POSSIBLE PSYCHOSIS, AGE I5

Dog-tired. The kind
that makes you want
to stop forever.

The kind that dulls
the knife of your brain,
the sick leeching in.

Or out. What did I
want to begin with?

Not to die. But not
to live, either.

Maybe it was this:
To have not existed.

At all. Not the finality,
but just never beginning.

An emptiness, without
the howl of thought.

My arm limp by the bedside,
an unturned page of a book
hanging by it.                                                           

Chelsea Fanning

BLOOD LETTING

I gnaw the inside of my mouth
worrying the tender flesh until
it bleeds, the metallic tang painting
taste buds red. The cuts take weeks
to heal, awake and throbbing to citrus
and salt. The whole lip enflamed and raw.

In the bathroom mirror, I pull
down the flap of skin, inspect the damage.
Pale rose riddled with dark craters.
Sometimes, the tears are visible
even from the outside.

I tell myself I won’t do it again.
This time is the last time.
This time I’ll keep my teeth sheathed,
my flesh pure and undisturbed.

But I can’t resist the taste
or how easy it is
to devour myself.                                 

Justin Goodman

THE MYTH OF THE SUN AND THE MOON

Hypothetically, if I’m my parents only child, I’m peaches wanting to be painted like French girls. 
          
        I’m the color of all the fraternities I never joined because of the way men make me feel
like such a good boy. And yes, I’m fetching and full of roll overs, but–

look, parts of me are night chasing the day parts of me. And it’s only a dog’s lifetime back that
          testosterone severed my breasts, saying “if you are so fond of this body; eat that too!” It’s grief,

this Baudelaire burlesque where I think You – hypocrite reader – my double – my brother

only to remember I grew up in a family with bowls of wax fruits. I cut my name into a peach to know
          what it was like to be born, and when I got older I removed the first letter so I could die.

It’s nothing personal. Just the cover of night, with the older I get the more I believe in night

the way markov chains believe in words: throbbing throbbing throbbing,
an accident born of a million choices. Poems, in the grand scheme, might be equivalent to training
          cherry farmers with Hi Ho! Cherry-O. But I’m all out of Eden and have to start farming somewhere.     
          It’s taken me this long playing dead to realize that, yes, I’m an exquisite cadaver

and nothing at all like a still life.  

Tamiko Dooley

LA VIE EN ROSE

i love you as roses / tumble with abandon over wooden picket fences / abundantly, recklessly

 / craning away from the bamboo stems / that try to tame them / reaching far from the trellis /

from the wire arch they’re trained to weave around / i love you as roses / bloom in bunches /

uncaring they are too many, too heavy / for the delicate stem / shouting their colours / and

when the petals fall and start to decay on the ground / i love you as the gardener who gently

sweeps them aside / remembering their scent that filled the air for a while.

Cyndie Randall

SAVIOR

The man who lives
in my chest wears
a machete on his hip
and three to seven times
a week he whips it
through my pink jungle
searching for children left 
in hardened walls I have
no idea who sent him perhaps 
he is the Jesus I took
into my apple-eating mouth if
so he’s one crusading
drunk I think I’ll swallow
down a cup of coffee rub
our busy breast
and name him
Dave

J.B. Stone

ADVENTURE TIME & ADDERALL
after Pendleton Ward

Any given day
a couch in the
student lounge
would resemble
a bed. & a bed
would resemble
a coffin.
A menagerie
of tasks
would morph

into a swarm of maggots,
crawling, worming into my
being. Eating away at my senior
year. Failing class after class. No
one even knew I wrote more words
to my potential suicide note than to the
3000-word essay on Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus which I never turned in. No one
even knew, while my attention was lifted by the
daily dosage of Concerta—my spirits weren’t. No
one even knows that the vein in my wrists still twists
like an over-juiced lemon, that my bones feel like a bowl
of aspic left inside the back of someone else’s fridge for far
too long. No one even knows that the day I started weening off
my medication—it was forced. No one even knows the necessary
escapism cartoons can conjure, the lunch break we all crave when the
world is burning; when our anxieties turn our bodies into reluctant waste
lands; to watch a world shaped by lavender horizons & gumdrop moons. An
atlas of candy-coated villages, frost-smothered kingdoms, volcanic sentients, owl
spirits, grass ogres, treetop rogues, and bacon pancakes, is a medication all its own.
When the world is a rooftop about to collapse, under the weight of an ocean no gutter
could funnel out. Before the flood, I’d like to know that when I let myself drift——I can
enjoy the ride while it’s there—and be ready to answer to my reality——when it decides to

wash me over

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

BUT FIRST*
after Erin Adair-Hodges

First there was the word and the word was trying.
Trying the apartment with white walls, popcorn ceilings,
footsteps heavy above, thudding over our days.

Trying the job I took filing papers into squeaking cabinets,
the one you took answering phones for dentists. Trying
the brown bag lunches with limp sandwiches

and sliced cheese, the softening apple, the room-temperature
soda. Consuming it all on church steps, hunched below
the overhang as it rained. Trying the cold pool after work

with dead insects needing to be netted. Unraveling towels,
TJ Maxx suits, the walk back on the no-car driveway.
All heat evaporated. Empty stomachs. No one wanted what the other craved.

Trying the red Chevrolet with the bad battery, no parking without pay,
the bus rides to and from work, your stop, my stop, the sun hitting hard,
us squinting at the sky. Your last day, the blue electric toothbrush

they gave you as goodbye. Buzzing in your mouth with all those
trapped words. Trying the new queen mattress
we could not afford but bought anyway.

Trying the laundry we toted to the next
building, plastic hampers in our
arms full of every day’s dirt.

Coffee but no creamer,
bread but no toaster,
sugar hardened in the bag.

Day-old everything bagels,
buy-one, get-one veggie burritos,
dollar theater on Sundays.

New job but less pay, new boss
but no promotion. Saving for tickets
for never vacations.

Trying the places we gave up for each other:
city salted by an ocean, all those fish and ferry rides;
town with three stoplights, two policemen,
a forest to get lost in. Your dreams, my dreams,

weeds by the parking lot. Trying
your face a broken banister,
my hands an unused map.

*The first nine words are borrowed from “Portrait of Mother: 1985” by Erin Adair-Hodges

Leah Mueller

CRONE, PART THREE
 

My belly hangs
its bulging pillow

above the bristles
of my vagina, swells
beyond my pendulous
44DD breasts.

Ah, but underneath,
such powerful legs, poised
for sudden movement.

One summer afternoon
a New York subway
passenger inquired,

“Are you a dancer?”

I lied, said yes,
took a furtive peek
below the hem
of my sundress.

Chiseled and sinewy,
my legs looked
like they could

attack a steel door,
and the door would
lose the argument.

Sturdy pistons
carry my stomach
proudly aloft.

Compressed within
the sausage casing of
paisley stretch leggings,

a belly rests:
tamed but comfortable,
like an aging lion.

Sweet enough
to purr, but still
fierce enough to roar.

Issue 80 Contributors

Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer. She is author of two books: All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press) and the the chapbook Demimonde (Lithic Press). Demimonde won the Women Writing The West's 2017 WILLA Award for poetry. She earned her MFA at Pacific University. Find her in Painted Bride Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Twenty Bellows and Prairie Schooner, and at kierstinbridger.com.

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s poetry collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021) won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Brevity, among others. Learn more at www.shulycawood.com.

Tamiko Dooley studied Latin and French at New College, Oxford. When there's no pandemic, she's hired as a wedding pianist from time to time.

Chelsea Fanning is a writer, poet, editor, feminist, witch from New Jersey. She has an MFA from Drew University and is the poetry editor at Fatal Flaw Magazine. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in From Whispers to Roars, OyeDrum, Mom Egg Review, Phantom Drift, Ethel Zine, They Call Us, Flora Fiction, Literary North, and Cauldron Anthology. Her poetry delves into themes of redefinition, reclamation, wholeness, muchness, womanhood, religion, identity, gender, rebirth, and regeneration.

Justin Goodman (He/They) is an Ace writer based in New Haven, CT. His work—published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, and Prairie Schooner—is accessible from justindgoodman.com.

Halsey Hyer is currently earning their MFA in Poetry from Florida International University where they teach in the Writing & Rhetoric program. They're an Editorial Assistant for Seven Kitchens Press and Associate Editor of Pittsburgh Poetry Journal. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in North American Review, Watershed Review, The Blue Nib, Santa Clara Review, Yinz Mad?, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere.

Leah Mueller is an indie writer and spoken word performer from Bisbee, Arizona. Her most recent books, Misguided Behavior, Tales of Poor Life Choices (Czykmate Press), Death and Heartbreak (Weasel Press), and Cocktails at Denny's (Alien Buddha) were released in 2019. . Leah’s work appears in Rattle, Midway Journal, Citron Review, The Spectacle, Miracle Monocle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. Visit her website at www.leahmueller.org.

Cyndie Randall’s poems appear or are forthcoming in minnesota review, DIAGRAM, Frontier Poetry, Crab Creek Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She works as a therapist in a small town near Lake Michigan and is also a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine. Find her on Twitter @CyndieRandall or at cyndierandall.com.

Louisa Schnaithmann is the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press, 2021). Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Rogue Agent, and The Broadkill Review, among others. She is the consulting editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry and lives in Philadelphia.

J.B. Stone is a neurodivergent/autistic slam poet, writer, and literary critic from Brooklyn, now residing in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of A Place Between Expired Dreams And Renewed Nightmares (Ghost City Press 2018) and INHUMAN ELEGIES (Ghost City Press 2020). He is the Editor-In-Chief/Reviews Editor at Variety Pack. His work has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Frontier Poetry, Peach Mag, Noctua Review, Maudlin House, among other places. He tweets @JB_StoneTruth.