CS E-Zine June 2014

Curbside Splendor e-­‐zine | June 2014 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Curbside Splendor Publishing Curbside e-­‐zine June 2014 ISSN 2159-­‐9475 Poetry: Two Poems by Frankie Concepcion Two Poems by J.H. Martin Three Poems by Mitchell Grabois Fiction: A Plea to Myself at Nineteen by L.E. Malone Western Avenue by Joseph Scapellato Cover and art by Chrystal Berche Editors – Joey Pizzolato & Marcella Prokop 2 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Frankie Concepcion was born in the Philippines and now lives in Boston, MA. Her poetry has been published in The Rose and Thorn Journal, Lucid Rhythms, and Spectrum Literary Magazine, amongst others. She is currently working on her first novel. Art by Chrystal Berche. 3 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Two Poems by Frankie Concepcion Manila, 6:00 PM It is 6:00 PM in Manila and my mother is gone, but not gone. On a plane to San Francisco, where her mother has stayed gone for the past thirty years. I am hungry. I am writing this because I am convinced there is more to me than the men who broke my heart, meanwhile, a lightning storm breaks over an ocean of waves reaching for jet fuel and engines, and I am filled with a sense of camaraderie with nature. The tension in my muscles is new, I think, but this sickness is from birth, pain-­‐flowers blossoming above my pelvis like a warning− 4 Curbside Splendor June 2014 I have not bled in forty days. I am grasping at bird’s nests but my fingers were left in the womb and I always come up empty-­‐handed. I go to bed with a stomach ache. Before she left, my mother set the table, and rang the dinner bell, but left the food on the stove to burn. -­‐ -­‐ 5 Curbside Splendor To the Streets June 2014 When they found you we took to the streets Bodies raining down on concrete like so much shrapnel so much gentle rain And we popped the cheap champagne so it could burn our eyes and help us shed our tears, pour ourselves into avenues where our cabin fever broke, where the fireworks and police sirens (believe me when I say) were blaring just for you. We were both nineteen. I kissed a stranger as he sung his National Anthem, as you, on your shoal bled yourself and your enemies dry. Young citizen, prodigal son— For you, there is no more need, no where else, no more time to run. 6 Curbside Splendor June 2014 J.H. Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His prose and poetry have appeared in a number of places in Asia, Australia, the UK and the USA. Art by Chrystal Berche. 7 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Two Poems by J.H. Martin Pagoda Gone Listen to The stray dogs growling, Fighting for scraps On the other side of the dug-­‐up road. Look out Of this window, Littered with cigarette butts and empty cans; The pane stained with the heavy monsoon rain. Yes, these are the days they say – Loving it, loving it, Living the dream On a Monday night in muggy old Myanmar – Face – broken, wife – gone, Drunk as you know you are, Without so much as an old friend in sight. Indeed, No one asked you to come here. No one asked you For your foolish insight or opinion On how things could, should or will be here. Lost in this dream How could you ever hope to realise That you are nothing but everything – A lizard climbing, A night-­‐watchman sleeping, An old man in a plaid shirt and longyi, With the grey beard of this wandering fool; 8 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Watching, watching Emptiness Flowing through all this form Flowing through emptiness – Without beginning without end, Impure yet undefiled, Incomplete yet lacking nothing, The golden pagoda on the horizon there – Gone, gone, gone Beyond all of these things.
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9 Curbside Splendor June 2014 City of Spring City of spring, City of spring, You're an old dusty bowl Beat up by sticks Waiting for a spoon To make you complete. Your sides are cut deep From the mountain's skin, Your rim has been chipped By tobacco stained teeth. No matter what they put in, Take out or drain, You're just an old dusty bowl Filling with rain. City of Spring, City of Spring, Look at your glaze Burned by the sun, Covered in cracks Where the red used to run. Do you really think That a new spit and polish Will change anything? City of spring, City of spring, You're just an old dusty bowl Filling with rain. 10 Curbside Splendor June 2014 “Twilight Garden” by Chrystal Berche. 11 Curbside Splendor June 2014 L.E. Malone writes. Mostly because she cannot seem to stop. Art by Chrystal Berche. 12 Curbside Splendor June 2014 A Plea to Myself at Nineteen by L.E. Malone For a brief and wealthy while this year you’ll be selling dirty underwear to slimy men on the Internet. There’s a site called Ebanned for auctioning off things like personalized porn, used sex toys, condoms full of jizz, recipes made with shit and piss, virtual domination, all kinds of kinky shit. By the time Jake finds out, you’ll be bringing in about a hundred-­‐
thirty dollars on a pair of old shoes and seventy or so for some worn panties. The whole thing is technically illegal—
selling human parts or something. But you’ll like steak dinners and not borrowing money. The novelty in boys who think you’re pretty won’t exist anymore. You’ll mostly just get down about assholes always making you feel so uncomfortable. And you’re right, it sucks: strangers leering in public, violating you with filthy flattering opinions you don’t want to hear. Not always sure you’re safe. This is the year Jake will say, “You know, some guys look at you and it’s okay, it’s polite. Other guys look at you like they just fucked you or something.” You’ll stop leaving your alley-­‐view studio so much because a night out is increasingly less fun with friends and more just drunk guys honoring you as the target of their night’s pursuit. It’ll be the same goddamn transparent tactics again and again. A game for them that just makes you want to cry. So, you’ll start to figure these assholes that intrude on your space like you hate have it coming. The effort it takes to constantly defend and worry about your body will feel like work so you’ll say you may as well get paid for it. That you 13 Curbside Splendor June 2014 get the comments whether you solicit them or not, that they’re picturing you naked anyways. But let me tell you how it plays out. You’re going to get about ten dick-­‐pics a week. You’ll be particularly scarred by one old man’s cock dangling like an idiot between two legs in black leather chaps. They’ll try to form sincere nasty relationships and you’ll play them, angry over every dirty word they think wins you over, every image from some skeevy married man. A twenty-­‐something will ask you to send a video of you fisting yourself. Another will pitch a full-­‐blown pornographic martial arts sequence. One will request high quality pictures of your period mess and another will try to get you to shove a lollipop up your butthole and send it to him in a Ziploc. I won’t say which you do: two of the four. Can you see how this is letting them win? How this is giving in, giving them what they want, waving easy materialism over self-­‐respect? Jake will catch you and won’t speak to you for months. With an inkling, he’ll stumble across your first selection of auctions featuring full-­‐body nudes. He’ll read every email. After all of his kindness. By the time you get caught you’ll have molested yourself into quite enough regret. When you’ve become a liar, a cheater, a whore—without ever laying a finger on foreign skin. The men always like it dirtier, dirtier—the socks, the panties, the words—you’ll be so consistently creeped out paranoia will settle in. You’ll think you see the man you traded a dildo for a record player following you on the bus and be so sure of it you’ll hurt his feelings asking if it was him. For the rest of your life you’ll worry if one of these strangers will pop back up and blow it for you. They’re going to make you feel the need to stay anonymous more than any 14 Curbside Splendor June 2014 boy at a party. You’re worried if you’re good at what you do, they’ll see your face and shatter your pride in the eyes of others. You won’t think it was worth it. The peek into this particular underbelly will only make you want to take a shower. -­‐ -­‐ 15 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Joseph Scapellato was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Post Road, Artifice, Unsaid, and other places. Art by Chrystal Berche. 16 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Western Avenue by: Joseph Scapellato A young woman moves into her first apartment in the city on Western Avenue. “West of what?” says her mother, annoyed. They’re eating hot dogs and sitting on tape-­‐sticky boxes. The floor, walls, and ceiling smell like feet and smoke. The young woman says, “The lake.” They check a map on her phone. Neither have been to the lake. “But look at all these other streets,” says her mother. “They’re more western than Western. Just look at them.” They hug goodbye on the street. The young woman’s mother, who’s gone from annoyed to aggravated, is crying. “Forget it,” she says, “you forget it,” and she walks around the block to where she’s parked her emptied car. Alone, the young woman lights a cigarette and tries to see the stream of people in the stream of cars in the stream of traffic. The young woman moves into her second apartment in the city on Western Avenue. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” says her boyfriend, who’s moved in with her. They’re naked on a frameless mattress. He touches her legs. She feels impatient: he isn’t saying he wants to break up, he isn’t breaking up, and he isn’t working 17 Curbside Splendor June 2014 to make things bigger, deeper, or brighter. He’s on the other side of a fence she hadn’t known was there. The young woman moves into her third apartment in the city on Western Avenue. “Cowboy Avenue!” says her roommate from Missouri, riding an imaginary horse in the kitchen. “Yee-­‐fucking-­‐haw!” says her roommate from Indiana, firing imaginary six-­‐shooters from an imaginary train on the loveseat. “Giddyup giddyup giddyup, son!” says her roommate from Michigan, humping an imaginary man against the entertainment center. The young woman, who’s from Illinois, laughs more than she has laughed since high school and drinks more than she has drank since college and works more than she has ever worked at any time. When she isn’t laughing, drinking, or working, she feels an important bullet-­‐shaped something inside herself. It’s shrinking. Or it’s not that it’s shrinking, it’s that the landscape it’s punctured is turning out to be more immeasurable than she supposed. Backdropped in this way, the important bullet-­‐shaped something inside her only appears to be shrinking? Either way it’s hard to reach, even when she feels it. She tries to settle the matter but can’t. She tries to find ways to talk about being unable to settle the matter, but with words she reaches only other 18 Curbside Splendor June 2014 reaching words, and her failed attempts leave her impatient, annoyed, and immobile. She feels like a fence seen from faraway. She moves into her fourth apartment in the city on Western Avenue with her fiancé. “You don’t know yet,” he says. “Do it tomorrow.” She moves into her fifth, sixth, and seventh apartments in the city on Western Avenue alone. She lives above Laundromats and banks and liquor stores and next to used car lots and carwashes and car repair shops, and when she thinks about what it will take to move again, she walks across her floors and under her ceilings and between her walls to her windows, from where she looks or listens to Western Avenue, feeling always that she’s only ever where it’s left her. -­‐ -­‐ 19 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Mitchell Grabois was born in the Bronx and now splits his time between Denver and a one hundred and twenty year-­‐old, one room schoolhouse in Riverton Township, Michigan. His short fiction, poetry and columns have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in the U.S. and internationally. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012. His novel, Two-­Headed Dog, is available for all e-­‐
readers for 99 cents. A print edition is available through Amazon. “Cotton Candy Chaos” by Chrystal Berche. 20 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Three Poems by: Mitchell Grabois In the City I read Haruf for reports of good and evil on the eastern plains Travelling west toward the mountains Denver is a gritty place though not as gritty as it used to be It’s where people go when they’ve finally tired of the hick life I never tired of it but was cast out by greed and pulverizing machines I’m old and don’t believe in wisdom I only believe in removing as much crap from my mind as possible Minimum crap is the best I can do 21 Curbside Splendor June 2014 removing the greed from my heart (my heart—that’s a corny phrase) staying lean almost to the point of pain skirting anorexia anorexia a road too far into the desert a road where you stare at a cactus’s spines and feel jealous— that’s merely another form of greed (greed has a million manifestations) That’s why the Buddha advocated the middle path greed tugging at you from both sides the greed of overconsumption and the greed of self-­‐deprivation neither works both are ego Be mindful of both steer to the middle I would return to the hick life if I could maybe somewhere where people aren’t hardhearted and I’m not continually damaged by pulverizing machines In the meantime I’m here in the city 22 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Weakness One day Eppa insisted that I lift and carry her but she was heavier than she looked heavy-­‐boned and full of muscle like tightly packed pastrami from her father’s deli and I was weak which I excused by claiming to be a Jean-­‐Paul Sartre style intellectual even though I had dropped out of college Sartre himself was probably stronger Wasn’t he in the Resistance in the same cell as that woman who became famous for killing a Nazi with her bare hands? Eppa could have done that She had the chutzpah and contempt that she painted with a broad brush over society but she would have been particularly contemptuous of a Nazi Anyway, I hoisted her up my knees buckled and we toppled to the floor Giggling, she wrapped her legs around my middle and squeezed until I was gasping for breath and begging for mercy Would you describe this as high maintenance? 23 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Still, I liked her a lot and she provided job security as her dad was my boss Even though he despised me and thought I was a lousy worker he didn’t want to get his beloved daughter’s nose out of joint 24 Curbside Splendor June 2014 Explanations At age seventeen I was a Paul Simon song: a rock, an island I was Dostoyevsky’s underground man I was Camus’s Stranger, who only needed his neighbors’ howls of execration to complete him I was a zombie undone by a woman I’d met in New Orleans I was a diamond with a flaw as described by an Okie girlfriend who until I told her otherwise thought that The Diary of Anne Frank was a work of fiction The only thing I failed to see myself as (the only knowledge that could have saved me) was clinically depressed 25 Curbside Splendor June 2014 About the Artist Chrystal Berche Twilight Dancers Chrystal dabbles, lots, and somewhere in those dabbles blossoms ideas that take shape into images. Many of her current pieces of artwork start out as three minute gesture drawings and eventually get paired with some sort of still life photography and a lot of playing in Photoshop. She loves to take pictures, especially out in the woods, where she can sit on a rock or a log and wait quietly, jotting notes for stories until something happens by. A free spirit, Chrystal digs in dirt, dances in rain and chases storms, all at the whims of her muses. 26 Curbside Splendor June 2014 www.curbsidesplendor.com 27