RogueAgent

Colleen Abel

A LATE LESSON FROM EVE

In the endlessly waterless well: 
the purity of what isn’t. You can
live there, you can fill it with emptiness.
Down to the hard layer
of rock, you can dig, the deepness
of your body. Why does God love us
to say no? Why, denial so holy?
When there are plums and green grown things.
When there are men to be
devoured in one sitting, witless in your kitchen.
When you know enough to be 
immodest. When you can know instead.

Koss

LOSS

my ears
in perfect asymmetry
hear select
their mystic spiral
pairing, proof of order
god’s 
in-skull amps
blasting trauma’s
clatter, a pan
a pot, a deafening
cacophony of kitchen- 
dread
one ear deaf
genetic gift
what tamped ringing
might it hear
in windless skies
musical spheres
accessed through
spiral’s twin
longing of geometry

Lee Potts

BREATH

We can only carry so much breath with us
and I learned then that it may not be enough. 

Every summer morning, we rushed
to be the first body to break
the pool surface, still
and cold as a bare marble altar
long stripped of cloth and candle.

Diving from the deep end’s edge
I followed my open, empty hands
into what was once
mist or cloud or untidy ocean
before being bleached
and boxed in for us.

Down toward the drain,
a starless night sky
just beyond its iron grate.

A thin current pulled past.
Ghost tide needing no moon,
that never turned, that kept
whatever it washed away.

Luciana Flora

HOLY WATER

Everyone called me brave and adventurous, 
But that sounds idiotic at three in the morning,
As I lay on the floor at a stranger’s apartment,
One shoe still in place; the other one missing

The bright white light doesn’t allow me to see much,
Maybe I’m still recovering from the shock—who knows?
I remember that I’m wearing shorts and a shirt, thank god
Being seen in my nightgown would add insult to injury. 

The stranger looks worried—his gaze is holy water, 
He holds my head firmly and brings a glass to my lips,
I gulp in mild despair, spilling half of it on my chest
Have I ruined my life? Will I not recover?

My paranoias run wild and escape my mouth,
The stranger doesn’t understand me, though,
How could he? I’m a foreigner in his land,
I can barely remember my own language

He grips my arm and leads me to a room,
It’s mostly empty; suitcases decorate a corner,
He turns off the light and tells me to rest,
I nod, understanding a word or two

I’ve always been the fainting type,
A damsel in distress who dislikes being saved,
This is bad, I thought with my limbs on fire,
Passing out in a parking lot isn’t my style. 

The closest door—who lives there again?
I hear the bell ring and feel his arms around me,
He carries me inside after exclaiming something,
I capture a sweet scent that I can’t recognize

In the morning, I leave a note expressing gratitude,
And hope that my grammar is correct enough
Will I get used to this new world? Is this home?
I might collapse again, next time alone

I see him walking to his car two days later,
I blush and bow. He smiles and bows, too.

You are no longer a stranger to me.

Bill Wolak

DAYBREAK ARRIVES TREMBLING

AN UNEXPECTED AROUSAL

THE TINGLING OF EVERY CHERISHED DELIGHT

Artist statement:

In collage, one can only hope for the enchantment of the unexpected. One must remain alert and open to the infinite possibilities of artistic expression. Sometimes the secret is revealed in the object itself by observing closely; other times, it might be the juxtaposition of objects that resonates. Also, the introduction of chance operations into any established field of artistic routine helps to keep the process fresh. In addition, one of the aspects of nature that is especially interesting to me is sexuality in all its complexity and manifestations. So this is a theme that naturally manifests in my work. Therefore, many of my collages deal with the embodiments of desire, the markers of attraction, and the sacred delirium of love.

Rachel Cloud Adams

SOUNDING

When I was earth, 
handheld into each warming,
each cooling, 

when I was open-eyed,
well-rested in summer,
draped in my father’s worn shirt,

when I was fed, fed myself,
let my mother call me home
past the cricket-charged blue bushes,

I listened to the world with my whole head,
through the soft spaces above my eyes,
through my teeth and tongue.

Kim Stoll

HAZARDS OF MIRRORS

Memory is an incantation, a string pulled tight between
fingers. A woman with liver spots all up her papery arms is
measuring a young boy over and over with a length of red
thread. I’m tasting the sharp snap of birch beer. Us women
are doughy, dumplings in a chowder. Men blue-eyed and
wiry-chinned and lean. Women like a wet dress hung over
a clothesline. Men like tomato plants and scythes and
church pulpits. Women like church pews. Like dairy cows.
Hear the thud of a gourd breaking open on the river bank,
the reflection of a possum’s eyes in the night. I’ve felt fear
humming deep inside me, pinging up against my bones.
I’ve felt wild joy howling like a spring wind through lilacs,
like stripping off church pantyhose and rolling on the
carpet. Picking green beans from the garden. I seesaw
between nostalgia and feeling dead sick with despair. All
those bugs chittering, the sound of trees growing into each
other. Horse hooves clipping on macadam. Houses with
box fans in the windows, with jars of grave dirt and chicken
feet tucked under the eaves, lady beetles filling the
bedroom every summer. I’m trying to make a map through
memories that leads me back to what? Some glowing hot
version of ourselves before all this.

DS Maolalai

WILD LIKE WILD ANIMALS.

I lie in bed. it is saturday
on a free afternoon
and everything
is covered
with mushrooms.
around the door
they crowd,
gasping for light
and fresh air. my bed sweats
with the smells
of sad animals, creaking creatures
of bad
and breaking joints.
I flip the pillow - too cold
like falling off a boat
in summer in the sea
and beneath me
things grasping - going wild
like wild animals.
I feel my head
like cement
and feel it
breaking my neck.
the world treacle, the world dirt,
a place
where things
fall down.

Roy White

BODY OF REFERENCE: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
[Quoted text in italics is taken from Relativity: The Special and the
General Theory by Albert Einstein.]

As reference-body let us imagine a spacious chest resembling a room with an observer inside who is equipped with apparatus. Gravitation naturally does not exist for this observer.

He is my secret twin, the observer
floating in outer space
in this dream of gravitation.
In this room I cannot see out of,
I too have my apparatus, the white cane,
the computer that talks.

Thought-experiments love distance; we watch
clocks on passing spaceships,
stand apart while the famous undead cat’s
wave function collapses. But this time
we are in the box. This time we are the cat.

To the middle of the lid of the chest is fixed externally a hook with rope attached, and now a “being” (what kind of being is immaterial to us) begins pulling at this with a constant force.

We do not care
what being pulls our little world around;
for now, I do not ask if this same being
shut me in here, made me blind.

Einstein wrote None in the space for Religion
when he applied to teach at Prague.
They chose a Gentile. The Gentile turned them down.
So they came back and told Einstein
to write something in the space for Religion. This time
he wrote Mosaic.

But how does the man in the chest regard the process? The acceleration of the chest will be transmitted to him by the reaction of the floor of the chest. He must therefore take up this pressure by means of his legs if he does not wish to be laid out full length on the floor.

Having encountered walls and doors
and two or three steel beams, I can attest
that moving your face into an I-beam
is not unlike
having an I-beam move into you.

One day at Göttingen the wine machine
(yes, really, wine machine) malfunctioned,
pouring out more and more. They found a math major
laid out full length on the floor and asked him,
“Vielleicht ist etwas los?” “Vielleicht nicht”
was the reply.

If he releases a body which he previously had in his hand.... the body will approach the floor of the chest with an accelerated relative motion.

Is it the tug of a rope above
or a planet below
that makes an object fall, that makes the floor
the floor? We cannot tell. When a bowling ball
strikes my foot, even if I cannot see it,
my foot will tell me what I need to know.

Ought we to smile at the man and say that he errs in his conclusion? I do not believe we ought if we wish to remain consistent.

We cannot tell acceleration
from gravity, but it’s no shame.  The master
is not laughing. Action at a distance
he never liked, and I don’t either—I
like to keep things in groping range.
In his strange universe, this bouquet
of twisted flowers he holds out to us,
we’re either pushed and pulled by some force
or gliding free along the world’s curve;
the floor that rises up to meet my feet,
the lurch in my stomach when I step off
what I thought was a curb, tell me
what I need to know. What I don’t know
is whether someone is here, watching,
listening.

Cameron Morse

WIND CHIMES

I want to say thank you for the wind
chimes in your pagoda, the chitter
cheep of budding trees. Their emptiness
is only temporary. Thank you for
telling me this. Thank you for making me
believe. When I think about the virus,
I want to say thank you for keeping me
safe, for surrounding me
with chicken wire, cedar pickets,
for providing what I could not,
not even for my own family:
a sanctuary of birdsong and budding branches.
I am going into this by your grace, old
neighbor lady, because you loved the cold
wind of me not knowing
what may become of my chemo
crashed body and radioactive blood. 
You cherished cloud-cindered mornings
in March enough to string tinkling
dark cylinders and clanking pyramids
from the timbered eaves of your widowhood. 

Issue 61 Contributors

Colleen Abel is a Chicago-area native. Her debut collection of poems, Remake, won the 2015 Editors Prize from Unicorn Press and was published in 2017. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Housewifery (dancing girl press, 2013) and Deviants, which won Sundress Publications' 2016 Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in venues such as The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in central Illinois and teaches at Eastern Illinois University.

Rachel Cloud Adams is the editor for an advocacy association and the founder/editor of the journal and small press Lines + Stars. Her poems have appeared in The North American Review, Big Muddy, Salamander, Blueline, The Conium Review, CAROUSEL, Memoir, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of three chapbooks, What is Heard (Red Bird Press, 2013), Sleeper (Flutter Press, 2015), and Space and Road (Semiperfect Press, 2019). She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and received her MA in writing from the Johns Hopkins University. 

Susan Ayres is a poet, lawyer, and translator. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a Concentration in Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Literature from Texas Christian University. Her work has appeared in Sycamore Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Fort Worth and teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law.

Luciana Flora is an artist and literature lover interested in the complexity of human emotions, as well as the ambiguous relationship between self-expression and pragmatism. In her writing, she conveys her personal experiences while embracing rhythm and contemplating individualism.

Koss is a queer writer, fine artist and designer with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Koss has been, or will be published in Entropy, Diode Poetry, Cincinnati Review Online Micro Feature, Hobart, and Spillway #27. They have a hybrid book due out in 2020 by Negative Capability Press. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular.

DS Maolalai has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

Cameron Morse was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A.  His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020). Morse is a poetry editor for Harbor Review. He lives with his wife Lili and children in Blue Springs, Missouri.

Lee Potts is a poet with work in several journals including Rust + Moth, Ghost City Review, Kissing Dynamite, UCity Review, and Sugar House Review. He is Poetry Editor at Barren Magazine. He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife and their last kid still at home. You can find him on Twitter @LeePottsPoet and online at leepotts.net.

Kim Stoll lives in Tucson and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. Her chapbook, Anna Lives, is available from Dancing Girl Press, and you can read her work online at Cartridge Lit, ILK, Birdfeast, and The Boiler. She owns four large dogs and yes, they all bite. Visit her at kimstoll.com. 

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work has appeared in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere, and he can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.

Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Harbinger Asylum, Baldhip Magazine, Barfly Poetry Magazine, Ragazine, Cardinal Sins, Pithead Chapel, The Wire’s Dream, Thirteen Ways Magazine, Phantom Kangaroo, Rathalla Review, Free Lit Magazine, Typehouse Magazine, and Flare Magazine.