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Row Home Lit is a publication dedicated to the writers and artists (near & far) whose hearts belong to Baltimore. Submit at [email protected]. Like us on Facebook, Follow on Tumblr & Twitter.
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ii
OUR CONTRIBUTORS:
Matt Muirhead (cover art)
India Kushner
Christine Stoddard
David Tablada
Christian Reese
William Shaefer
Caressa Valdueza
Asheigh Cox
Moe Weimer
Samantha Obman
Kaleigh Spollen
Laura Short
Brooke Carlton
Katrina Schmidt
Sandra Evans Falconer
iii
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
Owning the Bones
I've been known to let them flow, every now and again.After all, I practically have a heart tattooed on my wrist. Its jet-black outlines never seem to fade.
But I've never met someonequite like her - loud and abrasive. Stories and experiences I'd never tell;she waved around herself,like sage brushing her shadow.Filling it with sarcasm,assault and curses. Perhaps she enjoyed it, putting the shock out there, instead of being shocked.
Maybe owning her skeletons,making them jump down and dance,instead of just gathering dust, was better. I wouldn't spring them on others, as she so often did.But it just goes to show you, we are all victims or perpetrators, clutching secrets like scarves to faces on cold daysor throwing them in faces like confetti.
- India Kushner
vii
Night’s Formstone
Hold your chin level with the moon
caught in the traffic cam’s dome.
Prove your posture doesn’t buckle like these row houses.
Prove to night that you’re an interminable giant,
not a burned down husk, stretch until your spine
is a crane boom, a white heron,
urban, rural,
portentous, powerful.
Three arabbers hedge the street,
breath marking where beards end & mouths sprout.
Their murmurs robbed
by traffic’s declaration of thrum & bass.
The skin of streetlamps across tinted windows
purloins their faces from night’s pocket.
Gutters eavesdrop on brilliant stories
these footfalls tell of how
standing in the moments
that property-stake dawn
you are the key turning in the lock,
the deadbolt revived.
- Christian Reese
viii
ON MY WALK HOME TODAY
the pine needles were falling.
they stuck to my woolen hat,
soaked with rainwater.
I watched the water pond,
and nodded to a lady with
her border collie, who
was drinking from the gutter.
I wonder if she heard
me reciting fragments,
aloud, to myself. Maybe she
thought I was crazy, or maybe
she thought that I had
the answers. I could have told
her that I didn’t have the answers.
I could have told her
that there’s soup cooking,
warm in the dented pot.
- William Schaefer
ix
I Hope for Warm Things
Night cools its coils
and I find myself hoping
for a neck’s crook,
and the blazing shelter of bodies
swollen with sleep.
- Ashleigh Cox
- Caressa Valdueza
sorry
sorry for being such a cosmic space case,
a tripping, stumbling bum
shooting stars into my arms.
i know i know, space suffocates you
because there are five missed planetary sighs,
tugging, tugging, tugging at my sleeves
suffocating me.
is the sky falling in the backstreets?
i wonder why you’re so sweet when you cry.
- Moe Weimer
xi
I KILLED ANIMALS WHEN I WAS A KID
In native american folklore
it’s the muskrat who plunges into
the bottom of the primordial sea
and brings back the peat from
which the earth was created.
When I was younger, there were
muskrats who lived near the stream
in my front yard. Every once in a
while I would catch a glimpse
of one running across the lawn.
I didn’t think about the primordial
soup, but of how I wanted to shoot
the muskrat with my slingshot, and
wear the rodent as if it were a coonskin cap.
Born in an earlier century I would
have been a trapper. Perhaps I
could have been the destroyer
of another world not yet created.
- William Schaefer
Life on the line - Samantha Obman
xii
send the boys on over
there is something
in the way you eat a grapefruit
with knife and fork, cupping the globe
of salmon pink with two calloused hands and
your mouth
pale like a tired sun
that calls up to mind
playing Red Rover in December:
sharp echoes over a white meadow,
heavy with gossamer fog,
the sense of hot breath on ungloved fingers,
asleep limbs awaken
when Alex and Dylan and Jay
charge through chained arms –
or the vast expanse of the sky above our wool hats
that showed, in all of its nakedness,
clouds hanging on sheets of silky steel
like strong men, wasted
- Kaleigh Spollen
xiv
Sonnet Zero
I thought that you could slink through the backdoor
like we did after dark as wayward teenagers,
certain of nothing except our mothers’ sleep
and the ravenous hunger we had for one
another. I thought that you could slip through
the cavities in my siren-lined sternum
and souse into me without sounding-off
the deafening plainsong that echoes and
echoes until I am alone, again. One foot in
you ask what kind of bird I’d be and here,
I will tell you, I am merely the corroding
carrion of a once lurid cardinal, filling up
the innards of feasting condors who stay
to get their share then carry on.
- Brooke Carlton
xv
Each of us born
one wound from another,
hands like adhesive bandages
stick to us, pull us out.
Compression heals by constriction.
Construction knits the dire, intimate crush
of fingers drowning in the seams
of foreign fingers.
What piles in:
heat, other smothering things.
Afraid of monsters hiding
between their teeth they took to flossing
twice hourly. Chase bad blood from
bold brains where she used to believe
she could smell in every seam
every secreted yearning
to pick over the scabs he wore
for a coat.
- Christian Reese
Pain Junkie Love
She rebuked shin-guards.
Welcomed home
long-lingering promises
of lacerations like lost sons.
He invited her elbow to sleep
in the softness
of his nose, try
its cushion on for skin.
He snuffed an ember
on his cheek.
She whispered to it,
Red rose, Blistered skin,
let me in.
Broken teeth smile best.
Tell me love pools in the gaps.
The holes in her gums fight to cradle
each of his
ingrown fangs.
xvii
i feel like i need to be more open with you because
whitmanyou are dead.like,what the fuck?(im drunk as fuckim cuckoo’d alllike cocoa puffsa stupid fucki like to fuckfucking senselessunder rugsof tragic magic cocaine clubs):hey,walt.captain.i am cuckoo’ing cuckoo’d cuckoo becausei want to live life with you.i want to slow down time with you.i want to binge watch star wars with you.i want to turn off autocorrect and accept responsibility for my actions with you.to eat cereal, drink tea, and retweet poetry with you.night after night orbiting space with youis not so cuckoo cuckoo cuckoobecausethe only way to mean something to anyoneis to be with themand to be alive.
- Moe Weimer
xix
The Boat
(for Peter, in hope)
At the very end,
when her breathing had become so difficult,
Peter said: “Go mom, Go.
It’s ok, go - go to Steven.”
There was one breath, then another,
then a final breath -
until she lay completely still,
so that the boat, waiting
there in the water,
could reach her, finally.
And Steven, her eldest son -
Steven who had been over there
all these years -
lifted her up, very slowly, very carefully,
into the boat,
into the seat next to him.
When she was settled,
and when it was time,
the boatsman reached down
for the long wooden oar,
and rowed out,
calmly, silently,
into the widening river.
- Sandra Evans Falconer