ROW HOME LIT - VOLUME THREE
an alt lit magazine for Baltimoreans at heart
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.
Š 2015 Baltimore, MD Curated, Edited, and Produced by Arianna Valle iii
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
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
those who listen for a voice will hear it
by bitten, bleeding tongues and
just like those who wait for a touch will
tightly crossed fingers. Our contorted
figures, bookends bracing the weight
feel it
of volumes of history books
and although I knelt down
each with a slightly different account of
in your ornamented chapel there was no
the same tired war. Not one of them gambling
sound, touch or any sense at all to be had by
on who fired first but what’s the initial blow
me
in that space — holy or not and
now that both contenders
as far as I can tell, prayer
have finally crumbled like Hellenic statues,
erected to be revered.
is nothing
but a waiting game for gilded sinners
I still revere your remains.
and those who sleep beside them.
They have the trappings
- Brooke Carlton
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
vi
Common Tongue
We don’t say We in poetry anymore. The collective consciousness died in 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 actually a vernacular if we really think about it? Doesn’t every fish secretly dream of a reasonably sized pond? Isn’t every pronoun just a contraction waiting to be realized? I’m you’re we’re; aren’t we all dreaming of midnight exhumations, the collective consciousness rising from the dirt somewhere on the West coast of America, scraping the clay from its tongue and finally saying what all of us thought? - Aurora Engle-Pratt
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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
viii
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
ix
Orange - Emma Mattson
let’s take oceans for example.
top of a hill
the wet salting mass of
of a turbulent ocean for example
through a window to the kitchen
shooting and enveloped by the ocean
see you? or inside you?
crushed recording and adored by your crush
yet be a camera the camera is
your love
kissing michael and he,
your ocean
can’t “in control of your feelings” you know? i found,
bursting at the lips, splitting cracking
kissing the ocean floor
think
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
at the same time camera 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 pan panning through a wide and possibly infinitely vast echoing but silent but whistling with wind meadow and up
you see a sea you sea you see a
more more the ship
your body rides the surf and you are smiling.
rent apart becomes the ocean too michael is cracking and becomes ocean too you’re swimming in
you are a writhing fish,
ah! how nice to be adrift in the ocean and feel at any minute you might fall asleep and drown.
all the while sun above glinting through
filming
above a swell, crush
how the titanic more
there is a writhing fish, a camera
on your back
the ocean
asleep and drown - Anna K. Crooks
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
xi
- McKenzie Ditter
xii
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
(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
xiv
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
xv
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 - Emily Bartlett
- McKenzie Ditter
xvi
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
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
xviii
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
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until next time... keep creating