RogueAgent

ISSUE 93
CONTENTS

DECEMBER 2022

Karis Lee
Jonathan B. Aibel
Eva Eliav
Hannah D.
Carina Solis
Cassandra Myers
Gillian Cummings
Mehreen Ahmed
Rebecca Bornstein
Aiyana Masla

CONTRIBUTORS

Karis Lee

MOTHER’S DAY PHONE CALL

Umma, this is not a story 
of diaspora
but of the first girl 
to touch the back of my neck 
and think to do so 
the shadow of her fingertips 
our mouths open and deliberate 
the nights i dream of being 

five and falling off my bike
your hands kiss my skinned knees
you bury my body waist deep in dirt
and water me into root

in the morning 
i call to tell you i want 
to be all the black keys on your piano
when i was little i thought
black keys couldn’t be touched

the ajumma at the hair salon says
i should be happy i was born here
in america i am beautiful 
in korea i am too dark 
to be pretty 
and in that country

no boy
would ever want me
i imagine myself
in an alternate city

face sheathed
in whitening cream
and wonder if i would still call home
just to hear you
say my name

Jonathan B. Aibel

INFUSION DAY

Awake to that special pitch
in my voice, eyes wide to cerulean
windows whistling, I'm in love, I'm in blue
sky fall, O Dex, you make me
hop, you make me
bubble and leap
out my own skin.

My guts knot and dance to your tune
as I try to remember who I was
before I took you.

You make me into Times Square
at New Years', jumbled with a crowd
reveling, dancing, sick-drunk, cold
each one of me lonely
and trying to forget
the trouble that has led me
to you, O Dexamethasone.

I'm going to stay up all night,
I'm going to read fortunes in my stars,
the few I can see

I'm going to talk all over myself,
all my shivering, drunken selves tripping
over my selfs, an ocean of me’s
roaring, stuffing my faces with street food
knowing I'll regret everything,
tomorrow, or maybe the next week,
sure to joyfully vomit on my own shoes —
I am all appetite, all dammed river
looking for a pipe or a crack to crash through.

Dex, you make me flow backward,
you make me rise at night and set
at dawn, laughing, crying, pleading
to let me sleep.

After this Dex, I swear,
I am never, speaking to you

Eva Eliav

FROM CORPOREAL

          1 

a stolen morning

the sun pours
its plenty
into a bowl of flesh

my veins turn
golden

          2

within my walls

I can no longer distinguish
between bodies
and memories

 what is corporeal 

what has been lost
to touch

          3

all I love
fits tightly

a second skin

today I’m moving parts
to another space

I am moulting

Hannah D.

IF I WROTE YOU A LETTER

The letter would go something like this:
I am happier now, bigger
in my body. Canary screaming

into the dawn as it cracks,
to no audience except for
everything, of which I am part.

A dissonant chord rips so freely
from my throat, clangs so prettily
against all the other living things

now that I have something to say. I have to say
that I am untethered, seeing angels as ghosts
and sacraments for the contracts that they were.

I can see it all from on high.
My voice sounds so newborn claiming
anointment by whatever holy thing still lives.

The letter would go something like that
if I wrote it, but I don’t share these things
with you: my soft, my permeable, my feathery insides.

I am getting along, I say instead,
doing alright, I am still going
to church, I am still going

to be your daughter, if we can
keep pretending. I am going
to be your daughter, no matter

how it splinters.

Carina Solis

FLOWERS WHERE THEY FALL

at sunrise 
we shoot bullets
into yellow daffodil fields 
curled by the scent of spring.
there are flowers where they fall, 
hollow point petals 
smothered in
the rotted reek of gunpowder.
the pulsing stench 
settles on our dawn-lit skin
and there is something 
beautiful about the loss 
stirred into my morning coffee.

Cassandra Myers

MY BODY BETRAYS ME MOST AT ITS CORNERS

If you spell hip backwards it does not read
     birth
All my infants walk like stones falling from a crow's
    beak

I lick juice from all the spongey
   loose
I have the legs for this kind of
    ache
Bent in the spidery
   places

That’s why my gods outnumber yours in
    arms
Half digit monarchy goats Himalayas to
     salt
that pinks their bellies to blood
   moon

I know my inserthood by the way my
    skeleton
puts on its fur one leg at a time then
   scarecrows
there in my father's
    denim

the untouchable is a tired string of
   pearls
made into a ball gown when I
   walk
the only clicks are magpies winking at my
    sparkle

forgive me winter for my betrayal my
    bones
slander you after pickpocketing your signature
    blush

There is a forever summer where
   naked
is my favourite wedding
    dress.

Adornment ends at the widows
    peak
of a grandmothers unshakable
   vermillion

I can’t stand the sight of my
   limpness
All this Angle hair pasta and I take a
   spoon
to the salted water and drink my
    fill

The pasta witch wears my nonnas
   apron,
tied around her middle like a rusty
    curse

for me to choke up spells from rolling
    pins
and ladles my pelvis first mother will never
    taste

I envy the angle of my brother’s
   back
Sternum of sturgeon, ox to my
   mule

If I microwaved my right
   toe
I might find a shoe to make me
   dance
longer than braid could cane
    me

Gillian Cummings

YELLOW BARRETTE

Yellow barrette, you were inside the house.
You were inside a dark drawer, inside the dark

house. Sometimes, your friend was indigo,
an indigo crayon beside you in the drawer.

But you were never a friend of my hair, nor was
the crayon a friend of my hand, of paper and motion.

What would the crayon have drawn but indigo skies
flown through by indigo birds, and somewhere

beneath them, the bluest fire burning to tell only
ashes are made of feathers of the feeling hand.

What did the hand feel, the hand not my own?
It went inside, like a yellow barrette into

an oaken drawer, like a crayon into a crevice.
Draw me a canyon. Call it a howl of love.

Pretend love is moving through a girl locked in
a house with only a hand, a crayon, a barrette,

to fill the canyon. Little barrette, what happened
when the game began was a terror past unfastening.

I knew you meant nothing, could not unstiffen,
nor unhurt. And the hand kept moving, moving.

The canyon kept calling for an eraser to blot out
the indigo of a thousand moonless nights.

Mehreen Ahmed

SOIGNéE

He bathed me in lavender. 

He perfumed my sinewy body. 

He clothed me in an expensive silk skirt. 

He fed me, all that there was—three healthy meals.

He brushed my long, dark hair. 

He oiled it until it shone. 

My mobile suddenly rang. 

The colour around his lower eyelids changed. 

They became sooty black carbon. 

He snatched my mobile and banged it against the floor until it broke. 

He paced up and down while I sat still.

He wrenched my body parts out--arms first, then legs, then my head turned around in a tight twist of his fist. 

Still, my hair was shining burning bright. 

He put my body parts in a doll box, where I lay stiff as a bollard until his adrenaline drained. 

When he took me out, he made me whole again. 

Rebecca Bornstein

LOVE POEM TO MY OWN LIFE #3

After the lost year & the year I spent
looking for work, bad job after bad job

ending, nights gone to panic
& cigarettes, all the phone calls

to the crisis line, my 4 a.m.s
spent sitting cross-legged

in the dirt outside my apartment,
watching the moon / waiting

for morning & the old man
delivering papers in a blue Toyota,

its busted muffler soundtracking
the arrival of dawn. O the nights

I half-slept, hips digging into
the springs of the couch, tv murmuring

& the lights left on, just needing
to not be alone in my head.

After the drunk driving (so stupid)
& the drunk not-boyfriend (also stupid)

& all that cocaine I never
even liked, but snorted politely,

& the uncounted days
I won't talk about. After the morning

I sat in front of Temple Beth Israel
and wept, not knowing

where I belonged,
where I could ever belong.

I thought for sure that something would happen.
Nothing happened.

I kept living. Again & again
I wrote this poem, trying to convince myself

I love even this dim list
of hurts & embarrassments,

to believe this love will mend
whatever I find that needs mending.

Aiyana Masla

DEW & DIRT

Every morning, so far, I am alive.

Every morning, as if out of a thicket, or fog
the world returns, slowly seeping, wets
my skin with color. Life rushes in
messy & ordinary
swollen day pressed
against folds unfolding
such softness. 

& to my surprise, my teeth are all
still in my mouth,
small & sharp as last night.

 Every morning, some living hunger, & birds.

Issue 93 Contributors

Critically acclaimed and multiple contests winner for short fiction, Mehreen Ahmed is an Australian novelist born in Bangladesh. Her historical fiction, The Pacifist, is a Drunken Druid's Editor's Choice. Gatherings, is nominated for the James Tait Black Prize for fiction. Her flash fiction have been nominated for 3x botN, Pushcart, Publication of the Month. A contributor to the Best Asian Speculative Fiction Anthology, 2022. her works have also been shortlisted, finalist, and have received honorable mention.

Jonathan B. Aibel is a recovering software engineer who lives in Concord, MA, homelands of the Nipmuc. His poems have been published, or will soon appear, in Chautauqua, American Journal of Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Ocean State Review, Pangyrus, and elsewhere.

Rebecca Bornstein is a poet and worker currently living in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University, and is the recipient of a 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowship, Her work has appeared in many journals, including jmww, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Baltimore Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. Visit her website at rebeccabornstein.com.

Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Boulevard, The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among other journals. She is also a visual artist.

Hannah D. writes from and occasionally about Kansas City, Missouri. She is a student of Creative Writing in the undergraduate program at University of Missouri - Kansas City, with occasional dreams of pursuing an MFA in Fiction after graduation. More consistently, she dreams nebulously of fame, glory, and immortality. She has not yet quit her day job as a technical writer. Her writing can be found in New Letters and Number One Magazine.

Eva Eliav received an honours BA in English Language and Literature from The University of Toronto. The child of holocaust survivors, she grew up in Canada and now lives in Israel. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals, online and in print. She has published two poetry chapbooks: Eve (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2019) and One Summer Day (Kelsay Books, 2021).

Karis Lee is a middle-school-teacher. She lives and writes in Washington D.C. Her work can be found in MudRoom Magazine and The Baltimore Review.

Aiyana Masla is the author of the chapbook Stone Fruit (Bottlecap Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Cordella Press, the West Trestle Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Vagabond City Poetry, as a part of the collection So Many Ways to Draw a Ghost, and elsewhere. She is an interdisciplinary artist and anti-bias educator, currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Cassandra Myers (they/she) is a queer, non-binary, crippled, mad, South-Asian-Italian performance poet and counsellor from Tkaronto, Ontario. Raised in the slam poetry community for seven years, Cassandra has earned titles such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion. As she transitions to the page, her work has won the ARC Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year Award 2021 and the Reader's Choice Award, and long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize 2021. Their first collection of poems, Smash the Headlights, is forthcoming from Write Bloody North Publishing. Find them online @cass.myers.poetry or at their website: cass.myers.com.

Carina Solis is an African-American writer from Georgia. Her work has been recognized or is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review, the Ice Lolly Review, the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the New York Times Summer Reading Contest, among others. She is also an editor at Polyphony Lit, an intern at Young Eager Writers, and a mentee at Ellipsis Writing. She is fifteen years old.