RogueAgent

ISSUE 62
CONTENTS

MAY 2020


Tiffany Shaw-Diaz
December Lace
Ariel Horton
Raymond Luczak
E. Bowers
Louis Zieja
Jingyi Qiu
Shelby Handler
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
Jordan Osborne

CONTRIBUTORS

Tiffany Shaw-Diaz

DAWN, WITH BULLET HOLE

I have never
studied wars,
but I wouldn’t
be surprised
if behind every
major conflict
there’s always that
one asshole
who does that
one asshole thing
right before
the first shots
rip souls,
like the one time
you asked him
if he really
did that thing
to me,
and by that thing,
I actually mean
his regular insistence
that I share his bed
with him
when I was only
thirteen.

December Lace

HOLIDAY PARTY

Her stick figure body whispers over to the butcher block / of cheese where I’m selecting holiday cuts to pop in my mouth / two fellow brothers of the ring are forming a pack / discussing the results of a show with insider knowledge / words my ears swallow / my battered mind can decode / my muscles twinge with memory / of the sport I donated my body to / colored lights and sweaters choking the room / as I think of internal oceans / of brain fluid / crashing in waves / as my unblinking eyes / stared above into the florescent lights / the canvas below my splayed limbs a coffin / the audience cheering my pre-funeral

My post-concussed brain is slowly bleeding like an egg / when the new arrival screeches into our communication like an emergency brake / and announces that her billboard body and magazine face wants to be a model / and she has a friend / who just got a gig / in wrestling because it’s easier to establish a career there first / a pit stop on the way to casting couches / and whisper-girl was considering doing the same thing

My sockets are still smoldering coal underneath my flushing cheeks / the doctors have already failed my tests / the muscles that involuntarily twinge at the mention of a ring / further haunt my daily routines / and I still have a day-glass waist that misses her championship belt / that no longer covers her internal organs / leaving her exposed to the stark real world where girls like this live and climb / I swallow my non-alcoholic drink / (alcohol makes my medicine tear fissures into my already wrecked brain tissue) / and say / while rage seethes like the Inferno’s undercurrent / that must be fun for you

Ariel Horton

FIREBALL

we’re so close that our cells could touch. as if our atoms
are fucking. I fold up every quark and tuck them
in the back of my mouth, so I can still taste him later,

when he’s gone. but now, his fingers are third-degree burned
to the knuckle, cupping my hot face in his hands,
and when he whimpers my name, it flares down my throat:

the last shot in an-almost empty bottle of Fireball
at a high school party. I swallow every moan
like half-doused flames, dissolving them

like broken cinnamon sticks on my tongue,
biting them like the bones breaching in his spine
as he bends into a bow of muscle and skin, 

and suddenly, I’m sixteen, dizzy, soft-choking,
with a red lantern lit in my stomach, my nails
anchored in his flesh like carving knives in clay.

Raymond Luczak

DAMN YOUR EYES

Your face flashes a hint of disappointment that you try to conceal when you see my hairy and slightly disproportionate body naked for the first time. It is not what you were hoping to find. My body isn’t made to order for your explicit dreams ceaselessly shaped online and reedited for maximum pleasure in your dark room between dusk and dawn. It is not remotely close to what you’d envisioned from my clothed pictures. My face becomes a metallic shield against rage when I catch a distinct drop in interest. I pull on my clothes and leave your immaculate white-walled condo without saying another word. I don’t show you my flash of wish: that you lose your vision for at least one day so you can regret this very moment of never allowing yourself the pleasure of closing your eyes and sampling the full feast of my utterly delicious body.

E. Bowers

I’M TRYING NOT TO GET CAUGHT

stealing the glass pane from
your last picture frame.
But, of course, with each theft
it all becomes 6.4% more
obvious.
I want to line the
walls of my room with glass,
so I can live a fragile
and dangerous life.
There’s nothing worse than
being sturdy.
I want to see ghosts,
outlines of faces that are
only sometimes mine. That
know to
smile.
I want to cut the
ceiling with a ladder and
show my teeth to clouds
while I wonder how you
don’t find this boring.
I want something.
But instead I let the thick
air press me down.
“Did you hear who
looked sturdy at the
Emmy’s this year?”

Louis Zieja

MY FATHER ON THE SECOND FLOOR

Fingerprints on the filthy
venetian blinds
drawn shut
so no neighbor can
see me nude.

No familiarity, false or otherwise.
Allow me to be unknowable
superior, unimpeachable.

These peeling walls and water stain constellations are for me only.
I will not share this message from above,
I will not sleep on my stomach.

Jingyi Qiu

PERFORMANCE ART

a tree twists and expands in the empty room

the peeling off of the wall gives off a peculiar smell
the stone is safe on the pillow

i am kneeling on the ground
waiting for the man to cut my skirt

Shelby Handler

THE ORIGINAL BODY

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

DEEP BLUE

My hair slipped out of its ponytail on the walk home like it did when I was young and playing—fine feathers like the stuffing of that blue comforter I used to pull over my face. Nice that the fabric was always so cold. Once as a teen I drank cough syrup, purple as ice pops, and that night I dreamt the moon was in my mouth and all I know is that now my gratitude feels like consuming an astronomical body: enormity. And the blue comforter is the soft sky of frosting days when I was twenty-three and laid on my back on a train from Philly to New York, so stoned texting a boy I liked whose curve in his lower lip sent disgusted shivers down my spine—the feelings of middle school kids giving each other the chills with cracked eggs and back-bloodied knives. Sometimes I am disgusted by my own desire. I need to split the hair to tighten the elastic, and it’s a twinge on the back of my head as snowfall strands fall on my shoulders. And we’re all still so young. At home in my apartment, there is frozen pizza for the toaster oven like the same as childhood and there is family I’ve missed in my freezer. And sometimes things are two different things like how home can be a place and a feeling and a ding from a toaster oven with my pizza ready. And at night in my home that is both a place and a feeling I’m a child who pulls the sky, cool and soft, against my face—my hair the changing of seasons slipped entirely out of its binding.

Jordan Osbourne

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A FIRE BECOMES A GHOST

you walk into the supermarket and you
notice the man who is staring at you
and your pulse doesn’t swallow you whole
you keep walking you do not flinch
the familiar swivel in your abdomen
as your body reminds itself doesn’t bother you
the memory of the fire the haunted body on fire
does not come back the fire is the fire
is a ghost and there is no more white
hot light burying you beneath its ultra
you walk into the water beneath
the moon’s passing as it bleeds
across the wake of a passing
thing you walk you walk you
walk into your apartment and nothing
smells like smoke you walk
into your apartment and nothing smells
like smoke the fire is a ghost
and you’ve walked over the edge
of the world to be here and the fire
is a ghost and nothing smells
like smoke you walk and the white
light no longer buries you bruises you the white
light is no longer ultra but warm
and orange light hello hello
orange light cocoon light and you walk
towards someone with your
palm upturned you walk into
your apartment with someone
and they don’t smell like smoke
you notice the man staring at you
and you do not flinch
and the moon’s passing paints
new patterns on your arms
tilted swirls under the water
the fresh water the unsalted
water and you do not flinch
because the fire is a ghost
is a ghost and does not hold
the lighter fluid of itself
inside your infected body your
take these antibiotics this must be your
fault body your body you walk
the fire is a ghost and the ghost
does not hold your hand and
make you ashamed of another
person’s hands another person’s
hands lighting the fire
and the moon’s passing climbs into
your bed through the window every night
and kisses your forehead
and leaves quietly
the way your mother used to
when she left quarters under your
pillow to replace your little ultra white
teeth you walk into waking into a passing
thing you walk into the supermarket
you walk because you are half in love and
easeful and the fire is a ghost and you walk
into the doctor’s office
without flinching the doctor’s
office without the fire which
is a ghost you walk
into your apartment half
in love with the person who
walked in with you and this is the pulse
you want to swallow you whole
and the moon’s passing loves you with all
its ultra you with all ultra passing thought
and you
you walk into the fire
that is a ghost and you say
hello hello i love you
like wishing you hadn’t
or seeing an old friend

Issue 62 Contributors

E. Bowers is a writer from Enon, Ohio. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and BM in Music Education from Wright State University. Her poems have appeared in Active Muse.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, as well as the author of the flash fiction collection, Better Bones, and the poetry collection, Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House. 

Shelby Handler is a writer, organizer and educator living on Duwamish territory/Seattle, WA. A 2019 Richard Hugo House fellow, their work has been supported by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Gay City Arts, Asylum Arts and the Yiddish Book Center. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Pacifica Literary Review, Homology Lit, 3Elements Review, glitterMOB and the Write Bloody anthology We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival. Follow them @shelbeleh.

Ariel Horton is an undergraduate student studying creative writing and theatre performance, always hopping around the West Coast and currently living in Southern California. Ariel has won a small handful of awards for her work, including an Iris N. Spencer - Myong Cha Son Haiku Award, the Clark County Poet Laureate's Award, and 3 Whittier Poetry Prizes. Her poems have been published in Pratik Magazine, ANGLES Literary Magazine, The Greenleaf Review, and Clark: Poetry from Clark County, Nevada.

December Lace is a former professional wrestler and pinup model from Chicago. She is a Best of the Net nominee and has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, The Cabinet of Heed, Mookychick, Pussy Magic Lit, Vamp Cat, Coffin Bell, Twist in Time, Dark Marrow, Rhythm & Bones YANYR Anthology, and Pink Plastic House. She loves Batman, burlesque, cats, and horror movies. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @TheMissDecember or http://decemberlace.blogspot.com.

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). He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and online at raymondluczak.com.

Jordan Osborne is a graduate student at Colorado State University where she works as an editorial intern for the Colorado Review. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Green Theory and Praxis Journal and Canary.

Jingyi Qiu studies the impermanence of life, the thoughts of human depravity, and the pain in all tangible and intangible existence.  Suffering from Asperger's syndrome, she gains inspiration from her practice in speechlessness and the insights she gains from facing various unavoidable human emotions and habits.  She came to America to study Fine Arts Photography and Creative Writing at California College of the Arts in 2018. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.

Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is a Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Stars Award nominee who also works as a professional visual artist. Her poetry has been featured in Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, Bones, NHK World Haiku Masters, The Mainichi, and dozens of other publications. In addition, her poetry has been translated into German, Italian, and Chinese. Her first chapbook, says the rose, was published by Yavanika Press in 2019. You can learn more about her via www.tiffanyshawdiaz.com or through Facebook (@tsdartist).

Louis Zieja (he/him) is a cinematographer, collage artist and writer originally from Philadelphia.  His poems have appeared recently in the Ghost City Review and Neologism Poetry Journal.  His comic book series “The Subliminals”, a collaboration with artist Anton Blake, will be published in late 2020.