VOLUME 1
an alt lit magazine for Baltimoreans at heart
OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Jon Dambacher Shelsea Dodd Zooee Frankly Rachel Albert Jacob Ian DeCoursey Amanda DiGiondomenico Elaine Hsiang Sharea Harris Cecile Walton Kaila Philo Christian Rees Trevor Friedman
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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.
A massive hug and thank you to Shantall Gallareta, a talented poet and amazing friend. Thank you for helping to get this project off the ground.
Š 2014 Baltimore, MD Curated, Edited, and Produced by Arianna Valle
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The underwhelmed used car salesman finger combs strings of balloons boing-blonking on the SALE sign. Carelessly he allows several to spin free & float off without giving even one a last look goodbye. * A silver Barnum Bailey Circus train caravans beside me along the North 99 farm-town Highway. Tiny unpainted clowns shuffling loud card games releasing cigar smoke behind curl’d mustaches. O, smiles & heaven in my heart to be a polkadot’d fly on those compartment walls. * It was all over when I saw him under the stairwell ledge sidewalk alcove inhale from his blackened glass pipe. As he was exhaling he observed a large bug land on his knee slapped down & it went splat. His brain undid just enough inner knots to compute: acid-washed pants or charcoal grey t-shirt. Then wiped his slimy bug-guts palm against the darker shirt for it would be more presentable. He coughed. - Jon Dambacher
At some point (, sitting in the brimming emptiness in the umbrage of eight grey monoliths, looming cold and stagnant, the thunderheads ripened into silver shades of Rorschach inkblot indigo: the paint of pure dusk bruising violets behind my eyelids, the Northern Lights weeping colours I didn’t know could exist; staring glassily into the purple pink orange green raw aural void, the tint of the beginning of time, was like flying through lightning-laden clouds the white hot wires of my optic nerves suddenly somehow grasping electricity at thirty thousand feet; kneeling in the center, the eye of the storm, something bloomed open and, shudderingly,) I was swallowed by the maw of God.
In The Rothko Chapel - Shelsea Dodd
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Liberal Arts College in FL
All I remember is the shapes of her teeth, her fear of driving next to semi-trucks on highways, and her endless declarations that any cheap beer we scraped up for was still not Natty Boh. Sentiment is shallow and I miss her. - Zooee Frankly
Call It Crazy -Rachel Albert
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Being the pain in the ass I am, I was crashing on your floor. Because I’d missed my bus home. Again.
SMALL, SMOOTH DARK I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. - Charles Bukowski
You didn’t seem to mind. I’d been walking outside awhile through the sound of night suspended in the dim, purple everything, through the jaundiced glow of street lamps. And the wind was cold. When I got to your apartment, you were typing in the dark: tapping keystrokes like cricket chirps and hoping they’d form something structured, the way shuffled hydrogen and oxygen molecules sometimes magnetize into an ocean or a moving stream. Now, you lie on your side, on your bed, illuminated blue by the ghostly-dim light of your slow-moving screensaver. Your long, dark hair is spilling everywhere, drizzling thick and black over your eyes and onto your shoulders like India ink. The sound of night is seeping in through the window glass, swirling gentle, then sticking to the walls.
I’m kneeling beside you: You’re telling me things. Your eyes are tired. Your voice is small. Like the distant call of some nocturnal fowl. In a few moments, you’ll sit back up and begin finagling sentences again, your fingers long and slender, almost too long for your altogether smallness, spidering over your laptop’s keys. And I’ll want to touch your hand, want to help you type, because I have a story:
You and I’d snuck one damn-cold night to the top floor of the Marriott Hotel, and out a window, and onto a ledge that looked out and out and out and out. You’d done this before; it was my first time. From our height, the city below us— the buildings, the lampposts, the crawling cars on the blacktopped roads— all flickered in and out and whispered. So as you lie here, before you get up again, whisper to me small and gentle like the darkness of your room, like the smooth shadows I wish would eat us whole even if just for a little while. Let me stretch my arm over your chest and cover you like liquid. Cover me like a cold wind, curling around my appendages, graceful in the dark. Let me press my face into your hair and find nightbirds nesting between the strands. They’ll exhale chirps, fluttering warm through me, through the near-silence, like summer moths ghosting in the orbish glow of streetlamps— - Jacob Ian DeCoursey
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- Amanda DiGiondomenico
easy on the ginger
i am sitting in the middle of my kitchen at the very tippy center of a tile that measures two size sevens by two size sevens eating quadratinis out of my mother’s little black work bag. the blankets are wrapped tighter around me to fit into the confines of the mortar. i can’t leave my coattails out. i like this system. it’s inefficient like the U.S. when the doorbell rings i do clumsy things like make the trash can tip over so it sounds like a dog did it. who the fuck makes pomegranate flavored craisins? this time i stand up only after the third ring, because i dropped a wafer outside my tippy tile and onto the one with the craisins. i have been eating them ever since i found the porno mag rolled up underneath. - Elaine Hsiang
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long distance: of stars and space ii.
i know you didn't whisper in my ear that night. i know you didn't tell me how much you loved me and were scared. how much you wished you had the courage to say this to me while i was not sleeping. wished you had enough money to woo me like a train executive or old man in an Atlanta night club. how much you wished i'd only loved you enough to say goodbye after the incident at Ocean City or the first night we made love - or the afternoon before hand. i know you never wished to have a net long enough to catch a shooting star on her pathway home. i know you tried to let her go but she began to orbit around you and wouldn't leave you alone. i know you grew accustomed to her light and finally let her stay. i know you never wanted this but you love me anyway.
Suspended Flowers - Cecile Walton
- Sharea Harris
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today I will die
and those to notice will float in crystal air gray oceans will wash seashells from their mother staining uniformed silence; by my shoulders by my back bones will crumble like southern mountains and I will fall; and I won’t be brown anymore, I’ll be clear, an unencumbered silver slipping from Man’s eyes into his psyche, and clouds will reflect off of me; I will lift through being and into blackness, I will hold the stars on my fingernails and breathe life into the cosmos.
- Kaila Philo
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Transplant’s Christmas
Low flying helos dig luminous, baptismal swimming pools in our backyards. Our usual streets string lights, the call of sirens; winter birds of red and blue and black. Newly arrived, eyes unfamiliar, pocketing snow as it sublimes from garbage cans. A bodega’s glow papers tree limbs. Convenience store burners mimic far-off bells. Last year’s gun shots gift us this year’s plexi-glass. 25-cent cigarettes in my coat pocket lose themselves. A man in a leather jacket feels ice shuffle states on the back of his neck. He pauses at my block’s Bathtub Mary, crosses himself, touching each shoulder gently, just to be certain that he’s still standing.
- Christian Rees
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New Year Sunrise
I woke up from the night and felt right about it. I wanted to write about it. I searched my inner earth for words and mirrors as my eyes and ears opened into the same room, but in a brand new year. I could hear echoes of leftover whispers and see wintery specks on the whiskers of the black cat laid flat down on my leg. Stuck in his little head like a listener. I was just the same as I remained and caught a glimpse of her. A silent song was drawn out from her drowsy mouth’s violin yawn, And I found myself in the sounds where I belonged. Soaking in gentle mental morning light. Hoping to never hear another phone ring. Never again knowing the time. With my river song forever flowing in rhyme. Drifting in and out of a mind-state so safe I could sit and wait And find places in the open parks and glowing spark-lit houses in the night time of my quieted consciousness. My mind lightened with thoughtlessness. And my lungs pulled in the sighs and breaths that crept from inside of her. I saw myself blind to the swirls that unfurled in the mind of a girl, curled up so deep and asleep in her private world. All I could see of her dream was soft quick quivering of her breezy eyelids moving free like a violet’s blooming wings. But with no picture like the backside of a movie screen.
Darling, my heart is ablaze and soon will be this city
-Arianna Valle
No longer restless was the pace we created. I turned away from her, laid down face up in my hazy world, And rested purely and surely. Planted securely next to her purring best friend. My eyes closed again, And my mind rose high with a slight bend And a sense that I felt plenty ready to welcome whatever heavy life was inevitably sending ahead. -Trevor Friedman
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until next time... keep creating x