RogueAgent

ISSUE 51
CONTENTS

JUNE 2019

Anthony AW
Gemma Cooper-Novack
Hannah Yerington
Ellen Samuels
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah
Raymond Luczak
Callista Buchen
Christine Taylor
Jasper Kennedy

CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony AW

…LOVEPOEMLOADING…

Is there
one word
to unlock
your heart?

I text
virtual rolodex,
baiting congratulatory
sad lust.

Your lone
wolf attracts
bears westside,
dutifully elsewhere.

Months ago
you shared
your abstracts
by cellphone.

Is there
a word
for this
impermanent stroke?

We intersected
somewhere’n the
universe. She
smirks, candles 

flickering along
my dumb,
I was
looking up—

you asked
one simple
question, are
you writing?

Gemma Cooper-Novack

WHAT WE WORE

In the conversation that made us friends we were painting rouge onto green cheeks
of a four-foot-high head and fashioning dragon scales
from soda cans. You were leaving your tailored phase and your pants
were those wide-legged flowing ones, black fabric waterfalling off
the edge of the seat.  Back then everything I wore was either
fuzzy or shiny, but it was a build so probably I
was wearing shop clothes, shredded jeans and I was skinny then so the octopus
t-shirt would have legged itself around my ribs. Fifteen
years later on the last day of your abusive job we spent two hours selecting
the leather kneelength skirt, the cummerbund, the mint-green
presidential blazer. I took photographs of you to send
to your partner. For every opening night until I gained
too much weight I wore that black and lavender corset, sometimes even
that black skirt bordered with tulle cloud, and at the gallery
reception I said I wanted to outhipster the hipsters
using only my hips. The night we went clubbing like grown women and I picked up
the British blues musician on the three a.m. train I don't remember what we wore
except I had that hot pink miniskirt and pedestrians thought us hookers
while we waited for the bus. The first time I wore the orange
Dior blazer my housemate took a picture for you, my hair
spinning off wildly; when it was long you
buzzed it off, leaving a strip of curls dangling down the middle of my scalp, strongly
suggesting I keep it. Years before at the library I found you with a bandanna
over your head and tight against your ears; it’s shaved under here you said and
didn’t show me. In your apartment that was a ballroom we wore gowns
for the apocalypse, ribboned dance cards to our wrists. You had layers
of lace overlay fanning across your shoulders and I'd ripped the zipper from the back
of the black velvet gown and replaced it with red satin ribbon
laced down to the base of my spine. I wore cutoffs to the seed-bombing party;
you had a purple manicure with glitter to remind myself you said
that I am living in contradiction. You bought a cardigan with elbow
patches to dispatch you back into academic work and now I buy almost
all my cashmere sweaters from the men's section at the thrift store, though
I still wish I could find necklines that dive down to the tops
of my breasts. For me an outfit doesn't work unless
it gets my breasts; for you it's the line from waist to shoulder, its shifts
and angles. I gave you a bracelet made out
of a butter knife. You are fibrous, embroidered,
knitted. I am silk and linen. Textures shift into years between our fingers.

Hannah Yerington

SONG OF JUDITH

I begin by text.
I begin by holding the head of the king, by knowing the lines of his army’s general,
by being painted in the ink of Medusa.

The widow’s beauty is charmed,
her breasts full of the iniquities of her people,
her curves heavy with their lamentations.
She writes their prayers across her lungs.

I exist in the margins of the general’s tents.
I’ve written myself into center, into his chambers.
He traces the outline of my hips,
the shape of lands he wishes to conquer,
formed by a God he seeks to destroy.
I am the topography of his desire.

Does he know I’m the widow?
There is nothing virginal in my form.
Each fingernail has known hair,
has known skin, has known dirt,
has known rain.
I know to pretend that I am seen.

It is in these garments,
the black that marks me as sorrow, as shame,
that I began to exist.
That I held my body open,
my flesh, inscribed by a pen held only in my own hand,
ink of my own desire,
a secret theology,
the hymns and prayers of broken lineage.

When he drinks to my honour, he drinks to my secrets,
He knows I hold more than skin,
he has come to know that black fabric conceals landmarks,
waterfalls, mountain ranges, and sparrows.
But he does not know their cardinal points.

 Only I have record of their directions,
of longitude and latitude.
He does not know their maker.
He does not know my God.

My beauty is charmed,
my breasts full of the iniquities of my people,
my curves heavy with their lamentations.
I have written their prayers across my lungs. 

And when I take his head to my sword, his only grace is that it was not my pen.

Ellen Samuels

ON THE HOSPITAL

When I say I’m at the hospital, everyone sits up and pays attention. The hospital is
serious. The hospital means business. Is there anything we can do? people say to the
hospital.

But the hospital is just a place I go sometimes when I am well enough to leave my house.

All these weeks and months I spend at home, drifting the plumb of bed’s expanse.
The hospital is not a building. The hospital is here, this pale inland sea.

My mouth is the hospital, opening for the words I can’t think how to say.  

My hands are the hospital, reaching for the spoon handle before it drops.

The sound of the spoon hitting the floor is the hospital.

The hospital is the shirt I unpeel from my heat-slick back, and the clean shirt I take from
the stack and drag over my head is the hospital.

The basket of unfolded laundry in the living room all week is the hospital.

In the center of my heartbone I feel the hospital beating, through days and nights that
bleed into days like a pink-coated pill touched with wet fingers leaks its shell until you
decide whether to take it or throw it away.

My dog’s grunts and startles beside me, her trembling repetitive dreams, are the hospital.

The sour at the back of my throat when my breath stops in the folds of night tastes of the
hospital.

The pillow I twist to an easier spot, the sheet that escapes from the mattress corner, the
quilt knotted around my belly, these are the hospital.

This animal burrow, this rumpled cot, fevered skin and dog’s fur and cotton sheets all
petaled together, this is the hospital. And it is home. This is home and the hospital.

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

LOVELY IN MY BONES
(after Roethke)

I am a woman lovely
in my thinning bones, in my cheeks
that rise like hillocks, and lovely
with my chiseled shoulders mantled
by a fringed shawl, and in the tatted lace
of my arms, legs, and face.

Lovely is my white hair, soft and fine
as dandelion fluff, and lovely the way,
with each step, my spine straightens, curves,
and my hips roll as if I’m riding a unicorn.
No one who sees me thinks, Hag, crone.

On the subway, young men call to me,
“Hey, Mamma, you can have my seat,”
and they bask in the blessing
of my long-toothed smile.

I dare to stride the dark, knife-blade
parts of the city, my aura spiking
a warning that I once wrestled Thor,
and brought him to his mighty knees
on the gum-splotched sidewalk.

You say this is just a myth?
Well, you better give me wide berth.

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

BODY

I think my body is a tarpaulin to cover our fears and prejudices
we have built over a night in the cellar. But this body remains
in the swamp, the land that reaffirms who we are.
It is ready, after many years of tribal wars, after its
new craftsmanship, for the market. You have
determined its growing dissatisfaction as the highest
bid and this is good to attract both old and new
buyers. Houseflies are reduced from this review,
the waste goes away with no loss. Because I have
found a room of my own when my edges
are tailored with Singer sewing machines
and everything is entirely new. The right buyers
note in a very careful scrutiny that the first
sighting is a principal feature and this body
is the conception that transmits its whole
gamut that is subjected to its brightest
spirits among expedients of the partnership,
I wonder if the part I face is the memory
I erase with your blood or my imagination.
So far, no evidence to suggest that these
forebodings are justified. I can ever work
out my restoration, I narrow the circle
I draw to enclose your sympathies and duties,
your position is really one of the master’s
weaknesses I foster, I cannot give you
the pain in character and purpose I may
know or not know, I go along, throwing
bubbles back, you have a boyish passion
for it. This fever of the body in the open
is distributed among the water bubbles,
its sky I paint is heavy with sudden raindrops,
vibrating in my head. I hide behind an image
of an absent friend. I lose my content as a male,
my voices are given to a stone nearby. The vault
in my heart is filled with a little piqued, a very
disapproving silence. It is too long I hear from
the houseflies, I drive up there just before lunch.
Because I want to find something in the indestructible
bodies, especially in credo, in the first years
of your widowhood in Florida, in the same room,
I listen to you with attention that has none
your doubts. I complete the snugness
we have borrowed from a divorce case.
We get ourselves the better questions,
you add the bushel to my acquiescence.

Raymond Luczak

FRATERNAL/IDENTICAL

if i chanced upon you
in a dressing room mirror
at the back of s&l
trying on a sweater
id recoil from seeing
the nakedness of your chest
the weird hairs sprouting
between your nipples
its skin stretched taut
against bony ridges
id say youre not even a man
even though youre 16
like me
id run away from you

but if id grown up
with you as my twin
id have seen your body
many times
maybe wed have compared
ourselves
standing together
in the mirror
& noting the tiny variances
between our identical bodies
id never think
my body was ugly
at all
id feel fine just like you

Callista Buchen

MEMORY AS FLIGHT

Here are the wings we imagine, women, printed in blood, muscle. Lush, our wish for what beats to transform rather than diminish. We say memory is not a ghost but a cityscape. Maybe it rains, maybe it even floods, feathers everywhere. The ground too soft, we map the whole town from above.

We require distance. The rebuilding effort, they say, it takes time. We lilt, we turn, we don’t wait for the weather. Here we are, woman: so red no one can see us, our low moans, our bellows, beyond these bodies, these machines. Peace. We could be burned, burning, what is sacrificed. We decide to go: ash and all, our shadows too fast for the broken city below.

Christine Taylor

WASTELAND

because you are never satisfied
I swallow my own grief
eat yours whole
a trickster’s hands
unmaking me
I scream a flurry of moths
how you destroy a cathedral
that refuses to burn to the ground

Jasper Kennedy

MY CRANIOTOMY HAS A SOUTHERN ACCENT

I am a Holocene beast trapped in a pit, tar bubbling
over a left eye unblinking, the tacky, black residue
of phantom ekg leads on my chest and violet blooming
from each aborted IV pinch. The flush of salt and
dexamethasone swims in my veins, tries to check
the swelling behind my eyeballs, 

but the angry pressure of stem or lobes comes to
some goldilocks agreement with the palsy of my mouth
to make each syllable drip like pitch, creep and drawl
past my teeth like asphalt sealing the cracks between words,
molds my lips into the shape of vowels gliding, a rhotic redneck
twang that I have never been able to imitate until now,  

and I can struggle all I like, but for the first time
there is no question where I am from.

Issue 51 Contributors

Anthony AW (he/they) is an LA-based writer. Their work has been or will be published in Boston Accent Lit, Drunk Monkeys, FIVE:2:ONE, & Mojave He[art] Review. His micro-chapbook, Pantoum'd!, will be published by Ghost City Press for their 2019 Summer Series. AW’s a part of the Pink Plastic House 2019 summer online residency. @an__o__

Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2019, and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM's essay contest. She teaches at Franklin College, where she advises the student literary journal and directs the visiting writers' reading series.

Gemma Cooper-Novack’s debut poetry collection We Might As Well Be Underwater, a finalist for the Central New York Book Award, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than twenty journals and been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Gemma was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship; she has been awarded artist’s residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund. She is a doctoral candidate in Literacy Education at Syracuse University.

Jasper Kennedy is an organizer and avid crocheter from north Alabama. A medical student by day, they write to reconcile home, profession, identity, and disability. Their work has been published in Screen Door Review and The Healing Muse and is forthcoming in The New Southern Fugitives. 

Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 22 books, including Flannelwood (Red Hen Press) and Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels). His work is included in Zoeglossia Fellows’s anthology We Are Not Your Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology (Squares & Rebels). He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and online at raymondluczak.com.

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is the author of the new hybrid works The Sun of a Solid Torus, Conductor 5, Genus for L Loci, and Handlebody. His individual poems are widely published and recently appearing in Rigorous, Beautiful Cadaver Project Pittsburgh, The Meadow, Juked, North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, and The Sandy River Review. He is an algebraist and artist, and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain, and Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.

Ellen Samuels earned her M.F.A. at Cornell University and has published poetry and creative nonfiction in numerous journals including Nimrod, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The American Voice, Disability Studies Quarterly, Mid-American Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and in a chapbook, December Morning (Finishing Line Press, 2004). She has received two Lambda Literary Awards and a Pushcart nomination and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is the author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster) and Kaylee’s Ghost, an Indie finalist. Her essays have appeared in The NYT (Lives), (Newsweek), and more. Her poems and short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Permafrost, Spry Journal, The MacGuffin, Reunion, and Cimarron Review. One of her poems was nominated for 2019 Best of the Net. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension. Find her on the internet at  https://rochellejshapiro.com.

Christine Taylor identifies as multiracial and is an English teacher and librarian residing in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey.  She is the EIC of Kissing Dynamite: A Journal of Poetry and the author of The Queen City (Broken Sleep Books, 2019).  Christine has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her work appears in Glass, Turtle Island Responds, Haibun Today, and The Rumpus among others.  Right now, she’s probably covered in cat hair and drinking a martini.  Visit her at www.christinetayloronline.com. 

Hannah Yerington runs the Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girl, and is a spoken word artist, and poet. She primarily writes about the space between Judaism and feminism, talking flowers, post-memory, and the body. Her work has been published in Werd, The Bolinas Hearsay, The Fem, Bearings Online, and Algebra of Owls.