RogueAgent

ISSUE 86
CONTENTS

MAY 2022

Hannah Land
Andrew Kozma
Jeremy M. Windham
Susan Barry-Schulz
Siddharth Dasgupta
ART: Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Cameron Morse
Elizabeth Joy Levinson
Shyamanga Barooah
Emily Franklin
Anne Riesenberg

CONTRIBUTORS

Hannah Land

OLD WIFE

It’s only an old wives’ tale, 
he says, as he mixes oats into a battered
blue pail until they congeal into glue.

When I tell him I can feel my cells splitting
down the middle seam, he offers me small spoonfuls.

I explain how the fire won’t stop
burning my hips, so he builds me an igloo.
Better frost than ash, so we lie in the snow until
my skin goes numb. You should write these
down, I mumble, as I lie

in the fevered womb of our bed.
He sings as he swaddles me 
in bubble wrap and old down comforters. 
I tell him it will not stop me falling,
just the bruise.

This is all I have, he cries. 
I try to hold him but 
my hands will not move.

Reprinted from The Body Myth (The Hunger Press) April 2022.

Andrew Kozma

A FEVER BREAKING

Grieving is a fever, and when it breaks you shiver
in a new skin. The rawness of the air. The silencing pain

of walking on uncalloused feet. And the hunger,
the lucid hunger which makes you an empty box

unfillable. Grief is an endless field of wheat
slowly burning under the unforgivable sun. And fever

is the burning of your body, a slow turning
like a caught fish strung up

in the gentlest breeze, a desiccating breath
of sour, swamp-scented air. The fever is a summer-

baked sidewalk, a concrete city stewed in itself,
a pot so long on the burner the bottom melts clean away.

Grief passes, they say, as a fever passes, but inside
there is no clock, no timer, just a delusion of eternity

unending now ended. These aches and groans,
these muscle-spasmed broken bones, this flesh

too sensitive to be comforted with a touch, this brain
boiling in the sealed jar of your skull, this heart

a broken drum, these lungs a rusty turbine, this blood
only blood, too much of it, just coppery slag pooling 

in your tongue-staunched mouth. The fever never
breaks. You crack and shatter. You let yourself out.

Jeremy M. Windham

POEM WITH LIMB LOSS

I believe it
because there’s no
alternative, or

I believe it
because I was coaxed
then promised

into believing
one nerve at a time
by the body

I carry
it will outlive
its welcome

I believe it:
the pulse burning
deep in the marrow

of what remains
replaces each step
it took

to remind the flesh
what it fought
to survive,

and when it stops
it leaves behind the idea
of the body tearing

away, skin
and bone I grew,
I remember—

I believe it
in the worst way
with the best intentions

because lost
is inaccurate
and unfinished, a lie

I believe it
seethes, not settles,
sharpens,

not shatters,
carves out a space
in the mind where it can

I believe it
answers to no one
and from its own fire

emerges the ghost
of a leg, alive
enough for the brain

to dream
for as long as it longs
to be with or without me

Susan Barry-Schulz

SELF-PORTRAIT AS BODY AT REST IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES

I’m fast becoming a doorstop, or perhaps a cast
iron skillet/ A sledge hammer missing its smooth
oak handle/A pair of steel-toed boots parked at the
bottom of the stairs/ Sand bags piled at the edge
of a curb/A boat-shaped boulder dragged by glaciers
receding up through the Hudson Valley left behind
finally on my suburban front lawn/ I am the “picture rock”
where we took all the photos/ Curly hair and Easter
outfits/ First day of school with the neighborhood kids/
new backpacks/ I am moss-covered now, thick with grass,
strewn with twigs and acorn bits/ A folded up newspaper
wet and swollen in a blue plastic bag/ Heavy; too heavy
to start somewhere new/ Too heavy to heave/ Stuck
between myself and a hard place.

Siddharth Dasgupta

IN HUMAN LIGHT

This house is made of beautiful bones.
They creak whenever a limb moves,
like the ache of the earth when trying
to recover inherited soil. They moan
in the quiet elegance of silent movie

stillness, whenever the weather begins
to feel the seasonal tremble—like when
summer dances in humid light; when
winter swells into its starlight shimmer.
To walk on these floors is to step

on skin, so you tread lightly, as though
you were walking on forest ground,
making sure each leaf is left unhurt,
lest its veins erupt in the dialect
of a listening, breathing God.

This house is made of beautiful bones.
Each screech, each whisper, is meant
to be an embrace—of remembered
earth, remembering the ones it loves.
Each moment a door groans open,

a window flutters like a lost serenade,
a drape drapes itself around the absent
words in a conversation, is that embrace
—it’s the earth remembering, and you,
holding on, in the absentias of love.

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

IN THE COLD LIGHT

WHAT LIES WITHIN

VISCERAL

Artist statement:

I am at an age where the changes in my body are becoming rapid and visible. These three artworks are from a series of pieces I have been creating around the themes of aging. I wanted to explore the landscape of the changing body, and reflect on the nuances of its ongoing metamorphosis. I also wanted to process my own attitudes to these changes. I like to use a variety of materials in my work, exploring the possibilities of collage. These paintings have been made with gouache, acrylics, paper bits, inks, pastels, and distress inks.

Cameron Morse

FLICK

Leaf light’s the flicker
I myself might
disappear in, a shuddering
candle flame, November
of the pink pill
in a dark blue bottle: Temodar.
I set my alarm to vibrate
in the dark theater. Remind
me of what’s Ziploc’d
in the breast pocket of my winter jacket.
I set my alarm but I don’t wait
for it to vibrate, peeking
at the time, again
and again, until close enough
I down the anti-nausea
an hour before I drop the bomb.
A sun god flickers.
His booth tucked among clouds. 

Elizabeth Joy Levinson

INTIMACY

I have not been the lilac
felted tongue of the hosta, wrapped
around the sleeping bee, heavy with pollen and
summer heat, but I have held my breath while it slept,
the pause caught in my throat—

And I do know what this is like, the way
I may climb back into bed some mornings and curl
my whole self between the base of your back and the breadth
of your shoulders, the warm soft where I wait for you to wake,
though some mornings you are more cliff face, unscalable,
and I do not know how to account for the difference.
Only, maybe some days, the bumble bee is drowsy, its guard down.
Others, it swarms in agitation. It has less to do with you
than of my own tendering.  Some days you are the defense
and some days, the thing to be defended against.

Shyamanga Barooah

LOCKDOWN BLUES

I light a cigarette
And stare at the empty openness
From the tiny balcony
Unable to offer a visible smile 

In the children's park
The fallen leaves dance with the breeze
The stray pups play, undisturbed
Trampling the sticks and stones

Smoke from my cigarette vanishes
In the intense emptiness
The guards stand exposed and helpless
The battle for space is only beginning

Emily Franklin

RIPPING MINT FROM THE WALKWAY, I LEAVE THE ROOTS TO ROT—

but it’s of no use, ripping out invasive growth
old mint and spearmint planted let’s say
carelessly by the house’s former inhabitant 

a woman who perhaps did not understand
what she was doing, setting forth a lifetime
of regrowth and annoyance, leaves pushing

into new sedum, roots tangling around agapanthus 
trying to get a foothold. Mostly I ignore and
work around, successful at turning away from such

strong scented intrusion, but other times I can’t help
it and here am knee-crouched like I’m praying
tugging close to the ground as possible, ripping roots

the way sometimes it feels good to pick at a scab
worrying the skin just enough to free its own healing
maybe stopping right before the blood, the way, too

sometimes the rape comes back and even though its
of no use to retrace the roots—ugly light, each bruise—
the mind does so anyway, or the body, ripping carefully

 at first and then more ragged, trying to clear the dirt even
though it’s like the mint, seemingly like one thing and then
not, and I think of the woman here before me who didn’t

think about what the mint meant, what it would do to this
life, such a rookie mistake, thinking one small act
couldn’t possibly be the forever rooting with it complex

underground systems snaking up unexpected, vigorous
achingly green even in the midst of autumn’s death knoll.
Still, I cannot blame her for such innocent gardening

and I’m sure she would be relieved to know I’ve let go 
resentments, and—mainly— let go the urge to pull
and on days when I must let rip, I also forgive myself.

Anne Riesenberg

WOMAN POINTS HER FACE INTO THE WIND AND BEGINS TO RECKON HER WOUNDS

woman takes off
her face
discovers another
plucks her eyes
dismembers
her tongue
evacuates
her suddenly
sunstruck
throat

woman cracks
her shoulders
against a rock
her collarbone
a fitful bow
her sternum
an arrow
anxious for
flight

ribs empty
smooth
as the gloss
of an eye
viscera
adrift in
cavernous
night

orbiting her waist
five bloody
decades of
disheveled flesh
all she’s
yearned for
but has
been unable
to shape
her slick
entry below
crowded with
dust

thighs tight
as a vise
knees clanging
like hammers
shins
sharp as
a handful
of nails

she assembles
her bones
makes
herself
a pyre
in the
mourning
an ark

Issue 86 Contributors

Shyamanga Barooah is a digital media professional with over 20 years of experience and has headed content operations at several global and Indian media organizations. On the academic front, he has been a student of English Literature and media studies. Besides his love for poetry, he is also passionate about music, especially blues, jazz, progressive rock, and folk music.

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness and an advocate for mental health and reducing stigma in IBD. Her poetry has appeared in The Wild World, New Verse News, SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Nightingale & Sparrow, Shooter Literary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Bending Genres and elsewhere.

Siddharth Dasgupta writes poetry and fiction from lost hometowns, cafés dappled in early morning light, and cities inflicted with an existential throb. His fourth book—A Moveable East—has arrived in March '21 via the independent publisher Red River. Siddharth's literature has appeared in Epiphany, Lunch Ticket, The Bosphorus Review, The Aleph Review, Kyoto Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in the Indian city of Poona, embraced by an always fickle muse. You’ll find the author on Instagram @citizen.bliss .

Emily Franklin’s work has been published in The New York Times, The London Sunday Times, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Blackbird, The Rumpus, River Styx, and The Journal among other places as well as featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut poetry collection TELL ME HOW YOU GOT HERE was published by Terrapin Books in February 2021.

Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, Redactions, and Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction has been published in Lamplight, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.

Hannah Land is a poet, theatre critic, and playwright from the Washington, DC area. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Sick Magazine, Pangyrus Literary Magazine, Fatal Flaw Magazine, and The Hunger Journal. Her theatre reviews can be found on Broadwayworld.com.

Elizabeth Joy Levinson teaches and writes on the southwest side of Chicago. She has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University and an MAT in Biology from Miami University. Recent work has been published in Whale Road Review, FEED, Tiny Spoon, Floresta, SWWIM, Cobra Milk, and others. She is the author of two chapbooks: As Wild Animals (Dancing Girl Press) and Running Aground (Finishing Line Press). Her first full length collection, Uncomfortable Ecologies, will be published in the fall of 2023 (Unsolicited Press).

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews Editor at Harbor Review, and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. He was diagnosed with an inoperable glioblastoma in 2014, graduated in 2018 with an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and two children.

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist and poet, who serves as a chief editor for Authora Australis. Her recent artworks have been showcased in West Trestle Review, Oyster River Pages, and Libretto, and on the covers of Amsterdam Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Sydney on the unceded traditional lands of The Eora Nation. Find her @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings.

Winner of Blue Mesa Review's Nonfiction and Storm Cellar's Force Majeure contests, finalist in the Noemi Press Prose and Essay Press Book contests, a Best of The Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, Anne Riesenberg's work has recently appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Voices Amidst The Virus, Pleiades, Posit, The New Guard’s BANG!, Heavy Feather Review, What Rough Beast, Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere. She practices 5 Element acupuncture in Newcastle, Maine.

Jeremy M. Windham lives in Austin, Texas and holds an M.A. from Texas Tech University. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net, and have appeared in various journals and publications including Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Spillway, Portland Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. You can visit his website at jmarkwindy.com.