Row Home Lit - Volume Three
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Transcript of Row Home Lit - Volume Three
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)
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
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...
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