RogueAgent

ISSUE 66
CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 2020


Kate Pashby
Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Julia Travers
Alayna Powell
Xuan Nguyen
ART: Christine Lorenz
Scott Wiggerman
Cameron Morse
Laura Smith
Cathleen Cohen
Nora Rose Tomas

CONTRIBUTORS

Kate Pashby

TOES

I remember what high heels were like
I would trot across my parents’ driveway
in three-inch black satin heels
each Sunday
pressure on the balls of my feet
painful swelling that only prednisone could fix
until the prednisone made me suicidal
in college
and I sent the last of it back to the pharmacy
long before begrudgingly throwing out
the last pair of black kitten heels
whose pointed toes squeezed my bunions
made my bones ache
and left red marks on brown skin

I remember what pointe shoes were like
I spent years dreaming of advancing to pointe
until I got there
pink satin shoes
the most beautiful torture devices ever created
stuffed with lamb’s wool
to cushion the tops of my toes
which were later wrapped in toe tape
all in the futile effort
to mollify the pain from an apparent bruise
under my big toenail
which set me on the side of my toe box
until the year my entire feet started to swell
painful swelling that only prednisone could fix
and I was relieved to have the perfect diagnostic excuse
to permanently turn my pointe shoes
into décor

Leslie Contreras Shwartz

DAY 45: POST INFECTION

I'm running and there are flashes of lit up sky in split knuckle Vs or is it my eyes / throbbing past the knot in the tree and my skull that keeps tripping

or dropping down legs in thick litters festering clots / and blueing baby the baby the rush of blood and tangled hairs in fingers / it's grip can't see but I feel all the bones and thin ledges splintering / out of my hands to the running the branches the scrape the bottom up black

purpling grip on my ankles & running / and run there's no set time or end to the burnt horizon up up the birth canal in a hairline turn / and there must be a choke or a cough in the hard bush but it's silent to base of the neck / who's timing and / I'm running         

so I won't hear it or know it and be it with this racing and the rubbing of my feet and thighs in the one spot that are dragging /this loosened bridge swaying / I'm clawing and drinking and spilling and swallowing / and the decking is cracking /the piles head first tipping / and breaking and flat out now it's coming I'm coming get up facedown they're leaving it's going not going get up keep running

Julia Travers

ALL THE HANDS

All the hands 
in my body
are tired.

They weave and push,
they block and carry,
they shoo, beckon
and direct traffic, 
warning, gathering,
braiding.

They worry and strain,
They clamp
their marionette strings.

What if they loosened
their grip?

What if
they all opened at once?

Alayna Powell

THE TONGUE DOES NOT BELIEVE

i.               It’s almost like the tongue has an empty stomach
and a taste for justice – whatever that may be, on any given day.

No, it wasn’t hunger that compelled me, but spite: hardened
in the space between teeth, making home out of a nothingness 
so miniscule that only darkness could attest for it.

ii.               It’s almost if the tongue is saying I shouldn’t have to feel this way and she’s right.
There are many things in life that faintly resemble God, and once in a poem I swore
she looked like me.

I have never been more wrong – fingers hunched,
pen practically begging for something to believe in
or out, 

iii.               Yesterday’s justice was a dry sob,
my roommate’s belongings strewn on the front lawn,
and cops standing over me, arms crossed.

iv.               The tongue does not believe in moderation. She never has.
Tens of thousands of taste receptors,
budding and rebudding…

v.               To misunderstand the tongue is violence—
and it is all I’ve ever known.

Xuan Nguyen

WHAT TO DO, WHO ARE YOU

we have been summoned
            from the celestial skies,
sweeter and purer
than you

                        to—to—

—[m]e: who are we, what are you—

well,
we exist, too,

to be beloved (unwanted)
to be enchanted (unholy)
to be human (undying)

you ephemeral thing,
we will outlive you,
it will be our legacy that lasts,

our names that time retains.

you will die before us, host,
           and we will take what
is rightfully ours.

we will persist past
your oblivion, obliteration,

disintegration. in that way,

we are here to love you, e!
more than, more than you can see.

[m]e: no, you’re here to kill me.

Christine Lorenz

SALT 0935 (FRACTURED)

SALT 4177 CELLO

SALT 9738

SALT/PLASTIC 0856

SALT/PLASTIC 1059

Artist statement:

Salt is the commonest of common things. Essential as it is to human lives, salt finds its place in countless metaphors. We can taste it when we can’t see it, in our tears, on our skin; it makes us thirsty if we have too much. As a mineral in the world, it has a sort of life of its own. Left to its own devices, salt fluctuates between visible and invisible, organizing itself into structures and patterns, and dissolving again. Under ideal circumstances, the mineral settles into clean-edged structures that maintain clarity and precise right angles as they grow. But circumstances are rarely ideal. Fluctuations in temperature or humidity, an occasional jostle, or pollution in the water will disrupt the crystal formation. Any state we witness is a moment from a process of becoming, and our own mutable nature is there, in crystals that never quite reach an ideal form.

Scott Wiggerman

LAUNDRY DAY

The house already smells like bleach.
I used a cup when I started the whites—
underwear, handkerchiefs, socks—mostly his,
but will he appreciate my efforts?
The voices say No.
I shift the clean, damp items from washer to dryer,
inhaling the freshness of disinfected cotton.
I set the timer for an hour.

Now it’s my turn.
I fill an iced mug with bleach,
etch a small heart in the ice with my fingernail,
chug.  The burn is harsh and immediate—
my mouth, my throat, my stomach—
as if the bad is already leaving me.
I pour a second mug, repeat. 

Despite the antihistamines I’ve taken—
on an empty stomach, like I’ve read—
the urge to throw up is unbearable
I force myself to keep the bleach down.
One more the voices demand.
I fill a third mug, clutch the handle,
holding on for dear life (Good one
the voices laugh), chug through the fire
breathing out my nostrils.  Another.

I imagine my kidneys, my liver, my intestines
melting, melting, like the Wicked Witch.
I’ve read that with enough bleach
flesh separates from bone.
As I dissolve to the floor, mug in hand,
I swear I see wisps of white smoke. 

I hear the tumble of underwear,
feel the heat of the dryer on my face,
but my own skin burns twice as hot.
I don’t feel sanitized.
I taste vomit rising like an alien
from my belly to my lips.
I fear I haven’t used enough bleach.

Cameron Morse

WREATHS

I dream you fall, lose your footing and roll off the rooftop. It’s the week you turn 32 and there’s nothing I can do but run to the place where you were dancing and search the street below, the striped awnings, for your body. The day before you turn 32, I stroll to Walmart for a deli salad and leave with a bouquet, our year-old shivering his chin, a bouquet of red roses and baby’s breath tucked into the undercarriage below him, little wreaths of frost on the passenger seat window on the day you were born, 32 years ago, in Guizhou. Listening to your litany of resolutions to visit the gym, swear off ham and learn to play the ukulele, I watch the white branches of frost dissolve, exhaust pipes whirling all around us in the cold, puffing behind stopped cars, flapping behind the going, going, gone. Live Well, Leave Well, reads the Speaks Chapel billboard. A dead deer adorns the limestone slope, chicken hawk hunched above it. Jump cut home, your bruised face averted, sobbing, you blame yourself. I wake beside you. Blame me.

Laura Smith

SHAPE-SHIFTING RESEARCHES I

Slow curve of large animal time.  Tusk and horn years, hour of the leg bone.  Pull of heavy leg and hoof, new companion animals in the body or just outside.

Inside the skin the skeleton is small, made of bird bone, bird organs: syrinx, gizzard, scaled feet. Low movements shaping below the eye’s range. Red tone on the pelvic bowl.

Transposing the organs downward like tones. Anchors, octave tubers, four-petalled coccyx, articulate toes. Bird bones earthed into frog feet. Dactylous pleasure in what’s not flight.

Turning the earth each morning: secrete beet light, heat, strained juice. Now, we’ll gather water, hair, a very slow tree. Later, we’ll gather stones.

Cathleen Cohen

YOU COULD ASK

1.

I am in the passenger seat, sap
green girl in a red car
with a boy,
                  speeding.

Think of creatures
with limbs like deer, electric hair,
thrill of heat, hairpin turns, foliage, just 

racing through landscape with no
witnesses

2.

You could ask how I
let him
            drive me home later
in that smooth, purring car.

Shadows flicker.
Windshield,
steering wheel, his
wrists, my
lap.

Shadow, light, shadow
rhythmic like breath, like

evidence 
                   I’m still in my body

3.

Disguised for a long time, I’m
SQUIRREL!  acute

to air shifts,
to whatever enters a room 

Hair, a curtain
for shoulders and neck.

Camouflage   LIZARD!   
of baggy skirts the color of stone. 

Flitting though speech, no one
asks why I    FINCH!

peck at food,  swivel eyes upward
to locate                                   

every window or door
in every room I enter

Nora Rose Tomas

SWEET HOUSE

Let’s play a game. The game is called house. I will be the father, and you will be the father.

 In the kitchen we will each imagine the other cooking dinner. You imagine me making you roast beef. I imagine you roasting me turnips. I think about the apron you might wear. But no one is, chopping or stirring. We are only waiting.

In the bedroom, we spend hours putting on sweaters and then slipping them off over our heads. This is what I imagined sex to be as a child, and it feels good to reenact now. It almost feels intimate, watching you pull off that turtle neck again and again. There is friction. Your hair is messy. It’s almost enough to pretend it’s something else altogether.  

In the bath, everything feels like a mouth —  confession, yearning, touch, all mouths. You ask me, what are you doing here? The question is, of course, a mouth. I say, can’t we dream just a moment longer? Perhaps it is all tongue and teeth. But you demand I recite my name. The act leaves me ravished and cold. The water drains. Everyone is alone.

Issue 66 Contributors

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA.  Her poems appear in Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, Chrysalis Journal, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, Philadelphia Stories, Passager, Rockvale Review and other journals.  In 2017 her chapbook Camera Obscura was published by Moonstone Arts Press. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy.

Christine Lorenz uses photography to examine the ordinary, overlooked, disposable and forgotten. She earned her MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and BA at Ohio State University. Since 2003, she has been teaching courses in the history of art and photography at Duquesne University and Point Park University. She lives in with her family in Pittsburgh, PA.

The poems of Cameron Morse have been published in numerous magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, Portland Review and The Indianapolis Review. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest collection is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020).

Xuan Nguyen is a writer who focuses on the intersections between transgender identity, divinity + monstrosity, and stigmatized mental and physical health. They can be reached through their website, feyxuan.com or through Twitter @feyxuan. When not writing or drawing, they can be found hanging out with their princess of a Siamese cat, drinking cold Viet coffee, or wondering what it would take to make a work like Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Kate Pashby is a queer Chicana hailing from San Jose, California and residing in Washington, DC. Her work has previously been published in Rabid Oak and Burrow. She has lived with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease, since age 16.

Alayna Powell is a student at the University of Pittsburgh studying English Writing (Poetry).  After completing her bachelors, she plans to pursue an MFA and further her career as a creative writer. Her work is largely influenced by her experiences as a black woman and internal struggles with mental health. 

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the fourth Houston Poet Laureate, serving from 2019-2021. She is a multi-genre writer whose forthcoming book, paloma negra / black dove, is scheduled for Fall 2020 release with FlowerSong Press. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Collagist, [PANK], Iowa Review, Verse Daily, Catapult, and Xicanx: 21 Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century (University of Arizona, 2022), edited by ire’ne lara silva, among others.

Laura Smith is a poet and scholar based in Baltimore, MD. Recent writing appears in PANK, Ruminate, and Bone Bouquet. She teaches in the English Department at Stevenson University and is co-host of the Sonnets from the American Symposium in October 2020: https://www.sonnetsfromtheamerican.net.

Nora Rose Tomas is a queer writer based in New York City. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University and a 2020-2021 Chair's Fellow at the School of the Arts. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lavender Review, Glintmoon, and The Observer among others. You can follow her on Instagram @dr_sappho.

Julia Travers is a writer and artist in Virginia, U.S.A. She grew up near the Chesapeake Bay and now lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She writes poetry, fiction, essays and news. Her creative works are published with Heron Tree Poetry Journal, Fish Publishing (2020), Whurk Magazine, Ecological Citizen, On Being with APR, The Mindfulness Bell and others. See more: juliatravers.journoportfolio.com, Twitter @traversjul.    

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Bearing the Mask, and Weaving the Terrain. Poems have appeared recently in Gyroscope Review, Unlost, Shot Glass Journal, Impossible Archetype, Modern Haiku, and Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry column.