ROW HOME LIT - VOLUME THREE

an alt lit magazine

for Baltimoreans at heart

ii

OUR CONTRIBUTORS:

Joseph Weiner

Shelsea Dodd

Brooke Carlton

Aurora Engle-Pratt

Sean Scheidt

Lorraine Imwold

Jacob DeCoursey

Emma Mattson

Anna K. Crooks

McKenzie Ditter

Shantall Gallareta

Trevor Friedman

Brian Wickman

Emily Bartlett

Simon J. Ward

Stephen Packard

Josh Sinn

Christian Reese

Arianna Valle (cover art)

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A special thank you to all who submitted, our

selected contributors, and you the readers.

This project wouldn’t be possible without you.

Much love.

© 2015

Baltimore, MD

Curated, Edited, and Produced by Arianna Valle

Blue Jeans

It’s often complicated

this place we live, the

things we do.

Gray skies, endless chatter like

rain falls and we cannot hear

the truth through the storm

to imagine there is a world with

peace enough for us all.

It’s often difficult

the way we work, the

way we try to live.

Black smoke, reckless winds like

voices gather and the thoughts we cannot

distinguish are swept away with the storm

of our emotions so we do not feel

the world around us.

But, it is what she does for me

in blue jeans. The subtle curve, the drop

of each cheek, the low waist line, and rolled up bottoms.

The light coming between her legs, the red her

toes are painted, the brown of her sandals, the thin strap

of her top, the trace of her breasts as she breathes.

It’s not difficult

It’s not complicated the way she looks at me when

she knows I am looking.

It’s a small smile, a thank you in her eyes

that today, through all the ways we live, through black

smoke and endless rain, that her blue jeans provide the

peace I know.

Silence the winds, cease the chatter and just look.

She is there walking in front of me and the blue jeans and

the swing of her hips make the world something better

than I thought it was just a moment ago.

- Joseph Weiner

- Shelsea Dodd

vi

MADONNA OF HUMILITY

I look for you in the same

city that we conquered years ago

as heedless crowned heads filled up

with drink and with folly,

           

too consumed with our own 

good fortune to realize the squalor

ascending with the harbor’s foam

before us.  I look for you

             

on even blocks of pavement

and staircases with railings where

buoyant boys go to learn new tricks.

I remember when you told me

       

Lean into it,

Just lean into it,

           

as though I had never before

surrendered my body to the whims of gravity

and let the greedy beast lure me straight

down a dead-end road. 

We were held together

by bitten, bleeding tongues and

tightly crossed fingers.  Our contorted

figures, bookends bracing the weight

           

of volumes of history books

each with a slightly different account of

the same tired war.  Not one of them gambling

on who fired first but what’s the initial blow

            

now that both contenders

have finally crumbled like Hellenic statues,

erected to be revered. 

    

I still revere your remains.

                   

They have the trappings

of a holy space like stained glass

green eyes that make the chapel captives feel

closer

to something they have always wanted

to believe in and it was someone much more

sound than me who suggested that

those who listen for a voice will hear it

just like those who wait for a touch will

      

feel it

          

and although I knelt down

in your ornamented chapel there was no

sound, touch or any sense at all to be had by

me

in that space — holy or not and

as far as I can tell, prayer

    

is nothing

but a waiting game for gilded sinners

and those who sleep beside them.

- Brooke Carlton

vii

We don’t say Wein poetry anymore.The collective consciousness diedin 1800. Buried in the wet mud in Ireland because nationalism, or on the West coast of America because reasons.Isn’t every type of grammar actuallya vernacular if we really think about it?Doesn’t every fish secretlydream of a reasonably sized pond?Isn’t every pronoun justa contraction waiting to be realized?I’m you’re we’re; aren’t we all dreamingof midnight exhumations,the collective consciousness rising from the dirt somewhere on the West coast of America, scraping the clay from its tongue and finallysaying what all of us thought?

Common Tongue

- Aurora Engle-Pratt

viii

I thought about you today

I thought about you yesterday

I thought about how I can't stop thinking about you

I thought about how nothing seems to change that

I thought about the bobby pin on my bathroom floor and how it's

probably yours

I thought about picking it up

But that would mean touching it

And that would be so much like touching you

- Sean Scheidt

- Lorraine Imwold

ix

Because I promised to write you a poem about it, but then never did

We danced through a cemetery,

between headstones and over

the bones of memories,

then climbed on top a mausoleum

and just stood there,

looking at the ghosts

of long-dead supernovas.

The night was cold.

Her mouth tasted clear,

like the way snow smells,

her breathing gentle,

the way fall leaves sigh

over frost-touched grass

and then vanish — - Jacob DeCoursey

Orange - Emma Mattson

xi

let’s take oceans for example.

of a turbulent ocean for example

can’t “in control of your feelings”

you know?

i found,

kissing the ocean floor

and

you are coming

to term with “feeling” it seems.

it seems so. yet

on the other hand you are a camera.

ok you get it you are a camera you are

panning it’s nice. you are a camera you are

watching the film in imax

on your back

at the same time

camera

filming

panning over a baseball field at dusk

mid game panning

follow the game following

the ball get hit

out of the park follow

the ball follow me keep your eyes following

the violet hour sky pan panpanning through a wide and possibly infinitely vastechoing but silent but whistling with wind meadow and up

top of a hill

through a window to the kitchen

see you? or inside you?

yet be a camera the camera is

kissing michael and he,

bursting at the lips, splitting cracking

think

how the titanic more

more more the ship

rent apart

becomes the ocean too

michael is cracking and becomes

ocean too you’re swimming in

there is a writhing fish, a camera

you are a writhing fish,

all the while sun

above glinting through

azure fields

kelps and rays and other

fish in every color

though you are

fish you are

very aware you are

not fish

a fish but not

enveloped and adored by

the wet salting mass of the ocean

shooting and enveloped by the ocean

crushed recording and adored by your crush

your love

your ocean

above a swell, crush

you see

a sea

you sea you see a

your body rides the surf and you are smiling.

ah! how nice to be adrift in the ocean

and feel

at any minute you might fall asleep

and drown.

asleep and drown - Anna K. Crooks

xii

- McKenzie Ditter

Monday

Hi wake up! It's Monday. You know, there was this one time I watched you button your blue shirt, your

slender fingers softly guiding the small white buttons through their corresponding holes - you went up from the bottom, stopping when you got second

to the top.

I wanted to place my hands over yours, to feel their movement in that small space of time as you buttoned, went one up, buttoned, went up again

in a simple pattern

but I couldn't, get up,

I just watched

mesmerized, in love, with fear.

My mother has spent most of her adult life alone

so when I watch you button your blue shirt

gracefully, delicately,

I feel guilty that she has not spent her time watching someone in their small moments, the way I do now. My father left, she raised my brother, she raised

me, 30 years later I have you, and she is still alone.

I hope in another 30 years I've watched you button countless colors of shirts and I hope I've paid attention every time. If the hope is to lead a better life

than that of our parents, I know for sure I got the best parts of my mother

but more importantly, I've got you.- Shantall Gallareta

xiv

(O)Pen

sitting.

thinking.

held up from sinking

by a blinking white light in my mind

i listen inside and realize

i never stopped keeping the time.

keeping all my lines aligned.

my fingers start gliding

and i start reciting

a poem i’m writing on the spot.

i guess it was always worth a shot.

it's the test of my brain stem’s ink blot.

is it a face?

is it a friend?

is it nothing but space again?

was i the one that dropped the pen?

maybe i’ll pick it up.

what then?

why have I been writing less?

whats happening to this flattening mess?

the words build up.

my earth fills up.

and just as i think that i’ve come to rest,

it makes sense.

drenched in song,

i was the pen all along.- Trevor Friedman

xv

greeting card verse

I don’t care if her hair was red or gold

or brown, and not a word about her eyes

or the curves of her body when she lies

by your side in bed when the nights get cold.

If her lips are red, no matter how bold,

forgo this detail; it just seems unwise

to waste time with the same lines that comprise

endless bullshit casts from the love poem mold

when you could instead discuss the first time

that your thigh brushed, just narrowly, against

hers and you wept into your steering wheel

because for once things were fucking sublime

and could stay that way and you got the sense

that this is how happy and healthy feels.

- Brian Wickman

xvi

what’s it like to be a constant in someone’s life?

to feel secure and happy and

blossom

into a better individual than you were before?

I’ve fallen for all the wrong people in

all the wrong ways.

giving and

taking away

like clockwork,

rotating hands and bodies.

words mean nothing when they only drip an

ounce of truth. I am not your past and you

will never be my future

but I still dream of sleepy mornings,

coffee eyes, and souls intertwined like vines -

reaching,

reaching,

reaching

- McKenzie Ditter

- Emily Bartlett

A Quiet Kitchen With Light

“And milk?” she murmurs to the windowpane

And branches of the tree I helped John plant –

Digging for hours in late September sun,

The birds abandoning us as night fell

And she, standing there with one worried hand

Pressed on her thin lips, the other angled

On her thin hip, stammering about roots,

Drainage, and the nurturing of frail life

While we pushed our shovels unheedingly

Into the earth.

“And what about sugar?”

She asks, heeding such little attention

To my stifled reply, too busy

With the window lattices, an upturned fly

In solidified death throes, and out there,

Beyond borders of lilies and lilacs

To where the roots clench earth and writhe in ruts

Across the lawn, holding on for dear life.

Standing spooning sugar after sugar

Into my unsweetened request she stops,

Leafs through a recipe book and pauses,

Her delicate hand on an earmarked page.

“This was one of John’s favorites,” she says

As those barren branches close around her.

- Simon J. Ward

xviii

No 31.

A day to myself, rare bird

A day of guiltless idleness

A day without tomorrow

Or the day before

The over stressed live short lives

But the stressless live too long

Run like wind one day

Sit like mirror water the other

Fight and feast and famine

Heat and cool and hammer

Love and hate and care not

- Stephen Packard

- Josh Sinn

xix

The Claw-Footed

I carve epitaphs on my attic’s window panes.

Forefinger smudges to life the watermark of tree limbs,

the blurred outlines of the projects, the school bus depot,

the Lucky Star Take-Out & Eat-In as the tub fills in

the absences crowding these tiles.

World you needed to be written.

Move slow and membranous through muslin and glass,

steam robbing chill tiles of their requisite discomfort.

Adagio in a white, chipped tub.

I wrote love poems on my stomach:

red words, pale paper. Blood conjoined

with fleeing blood, with the depth charge of my fingers.

When I dance barebacked and howling through

the winter of my empty house I’ll populate

its lonely confines with my steel skeleton.

Come clean skin and home, rearrange

my slaughtered limbs.

- Christian Reese

until next time...

keep creating