ROW HOME LIT - VOLUME FOUR

an alt lit magazine

for Baltimoreans at heart

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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

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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

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

- Christine Stoddard

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I Wish It Were Me

Who tripped that wire,

And ate that dirt.

- David Tablada

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

- Laura Short

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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

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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.

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Design - Samantha Obman

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

- Katrina Schmidt

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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

until next time...

keep creating