Curbside Splendor E-Zine September 2014 by Curbside Splendor Publishing Inc.

Curbside Splendor e-‐zine | September 2014

Curbside Splendor September 2014 Curbside Splendor Publishing Curbside e-‐zine September 2014 ISSN 2159-‐9475 Poetry: To Bed Without Supper by Kayla Kennett Two Poems by Nora Frazin Two Poems by John Sierpinski Fiction: Honey, Don’t Throw the Dishes by Ryan Meany Cover, “Flatiron Sunburst” and photography by Thomas Campone Editor – Joey Pizzolato

Curbside Splendor September 2014

Kayla Kennett

is a recent graduate of Wheaton College (MA), where she studied English and Women's Studies, concentrating on postmodern feminist poetry. She practices writing across all forms, but shows favoritism toward poetry and creative nonfiction, often in a confessional style, with recurring themes of motherhood, sexuality and mental illness. A New England native, Kayla will spend the upcoming year in Reno, NV, serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA at an environmental education nonprofit.

“Brooklyn Bridge” by Thomas Campone.

Curbside Splendor September 2014

To Bed Without Supper by Kayla Kennett

Sally sells sundaes on the side of the road, from a shabby food truck sandwiched between Subway and Tsang’s Chinese. At 3:45 pm, she buckles her boys into their booster seats, waves hello to the gaslight, and stifles a scream. In the rearview sits a yellow-‐jacketed school bus, all rough and tough like she used to be. Someday I’ll go back and get that degree. When she pulls up to the service window, the girl wearing a pocked complexion and Dunkin’ Donuts visor is waiting with a large “extra-‐extra,” extra cream, extra sugar. Every day, they make the same exchange. Two-nineteen out of three, eighty-one cents is your change. Keep the coins. No, I insist. Keep them safe for a rainy day. Up above, way up high, acrobats suspended in flight, the clouds begin to roll in. Sally spies a pair of tusks, a lion’s paw, the tail of a fox or coon and one beady, greedy little eye. This celestial beast, with its belly full of tips, must not know how many cheeseburgers a wad of ones can buy.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 She pulls her pre-‐owned Subaru into the parking lot, and counts the clusters of drops as they collect on the windshield. In the backseat, her eldest squirms in his sleep, wiggle-‐twitch wiggle-‐twitch. He’s restless, inattentive and, at best, only ten pounds overweight. Dr P. predicts pre-‐diabetes by age eight. Each night, Sally begs him to forgive her. I will be Ma-Ma, until I am Mommy. I will be Mom, until I am “my mother.” I will be Sally, until I am “that bitch.” Just before bedtime, brown meets beige as Danny spills his chocolate milk on the carpet, leaving a stain that will never come out, and she feels lucky. You’re a bad boy, Danny, and bad boys go to bed without supper. - -

Curbside Splendor September 2014

Nora Frazin is a youth worker living in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. She is a 2010 graduate of Grinnell College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, After Hours, Four Chambers, and others.

“Grand Central Station” by Thomas Campone.

Curbside Splendor September 2014

Two Poems by Nora Frazin

A Letter from a Tourist And if I told you it was dry you would know what I meant. Tires swung circular blades revolved ferrets weaseled into wheel wells. I could talk about the dust. I could talk about the cats, the calves hung by halves, teas, pomegranate clotted. Blood stood in the street drains, a celebration. I might tell you how I sank teeth into the breasts of pigeons, ricestuffed, not bursting— legs shriveled— I could speak of separate sides of the bed. We did enter the pyramid— steep climb, empty chamber, the only beating pulse mine. The bathtub green tiles— the hot muffled night— small nests of smoke curls. I would describe it so purely. I would let you drink the water.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 The Scientists Say for Michael, drowned at 18 The oceans will empty of life in the next forty years. The beach sand will bristle with translucent bones and the dried husks of seahorses, octopi. The seaweed will loosen its grip on the sandy floor, drift airily to the surface, where it will float alongside discarded beer cans. The sea will thicken with slick scaled ghosts. The water will boil in futile rage. We will burn our boats and leave our fishing line in knots. The only blood to pass our lips will be hot and mammalian, though we’ll lose our taste for even that eventually. So now I fill my mouth with delicate flesh: tuna, wild salmon, rainbow trout. For, you, Mike, The fish accorded you no amnesty. - -

Curbside Splendor September 2014

"Manhatten Bridge” by Thomas Campone.

Curbside Splendor September 2014

Ryan Meany’s

work appears in recent issues of The New Ohio Review and the Green Mountains Review. It's forthcoming in The South Carolina Review and Crossborder and has appeared in Story Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and Confrontation.

“Dusk Over Manhatten” by Thomas Campone.

Curbside Splendor September 2014

Honey, Don’t Throw the Dishes by Ryan Meany

Annette didn’t feel the world owed her something, which her ex had appreciated. However, as best indicated by her pursuits in religious studies, she felt the universe owed her something, and this, if you were to ask Jose, her ex, was what strained the relationship. If Jose has ever felt the universe owed him something, and of course he has, he must have outgrown the feeling by the time he met Annette, because he was surprised and grateful when it, the universe, arranged circumstances so she and he would have sex. He might say the sex was heavenly if he could imagine the copulating women in heaven insisting, "Break me in half," or, "Rape me." He would say their sex was enviable, not because people want to find themselves so deeply in the throes of passion as to beg rape of their partners but because he now, bereft of this particular sex with this particular woman, envies it. He is bereaved, a funereal feeling, he realizes, that has not been otherwise stylish for at least one hundred years. No one has died. No one is dying, although good luck convincing him that the process of his own death will feel worse than this. He is melancholy. He is forlorn. Last night he was drunkenly forlorn when he drove to her favorite pub. During the relationship it had become their favorite pub. After the breakup he forsook it. Forsaken he drove around the parking lot not seeing her car. "Thank God," he said, his car floating him back into the street. Had he seen her car he would have gone into the pub. Even drunk he knew the consequences. He would have tried to ignore her and her friends, who would have no doubt looked at him

Curbside Splendor September 2014 with a pity that was hiding disgust or dismissed him with a disgust that was hiding pity. One of those friends might have been the gentleman, much older than she and he (much), whom she'd been having unenviable sex with before she met Jose—before, rather, she and Jose agreed that they would only have sex with each other. She and the older gentleman, Peter, were having sex for at least a month after Jose realized he loved her. Because he was as forlorn then as he is now, he worries that the relationship did not run its progressive course. He should not feel the same at the end of the relationship as he did at the beginning. But does a romantic relationship run a progressive course—that is, if it ends, could the couple's course have been progressive? He worries that if he doesn’t find the answer to this question something very bad will happen to him, something so bad he won’t even know it has happened, something that could have happened already. Annette was not among the contingent of fat women who cannot have pretty faces even if they do, those required to marry drunks, prisoners, more minor minorities, men they wouldn’t have chosen given choices. Although by many standards she was fat, Annette may not have been fat so much as she was unfortunately proportioned. Her belly was the only fat part of an otherwise slender body, unless wide means fat, in which case her hips were fat. In any case, Jose loved her hips. For the first three months of the relationship he was drawn to them like a rat to chocolate, and she believed he would always love her this way, reaching for the button of her jeans for the third or fourth time today, and because she believed this was it, this was love, this is what it felt like, he also began believing. Nothing he wanted to believe more.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 The point is Jose did not know Annette was fat when he fell in love with her, even though her sad drooping belly, its general unacceptability, had become a major influence on her interaction with the world. Her wardrobe included only blouses loose and free at the bottom, to deceive, tight and low cut at the top, to titillate. Her breasts turned heads. Jose knew this. He delighted in it. Once when he’d taken her to the art festival, feigning interest for the third hour, Jose was watching a man in a crocheted beanie wearing several silver and turquoise rings. He seemed to be watching Annette, hiding among blue bulbs of blown glass with air bubbles (weren’t those a mistake?). He was, Jose concluded, trying to get a better look at her long cleavage. Jose approached her and whispered in her ear. “I can’t take it anymore. I need it now.” In Annette’s apartment, fumbling with her bra, Jose thought about the man, how jealous he must be, how he might be right now masturbating to the devastating thought of Annette’s unreachable breasts, wondering about her nipples. Jose sucked them hard. “Ouch,” she said. “Do it harder.” Sometimes Jose calls her at work. She answers the phone less often and has stopped returning his messages. Although they’ve broken up once before, this time things don’t look so good. When she does answer she sounds apathetic, almost annoyed. She grants a flat, "Hey." "Hey," he volleys. "How are you?" If you really cared we could work all this out. "Fine. You?" "Busy."

Curbside Splendor September 2014 Who are you fucking? "I don't want to keep you. I just wanted to say hi. I'm thinking about you." "We should probably quit doing this." Please don't say that. "What?" Please. "This." "Talking?" Because you're already fucking Peter again. "We can't talk?" "You know what I mean. Maybe after some time." "How much time?" "Jose." "I understand. I'm sorry." We can't talk. We can't be friends. You ignore my existence. I ignore yours. You go back to Old Man Soft Cock. I throw away seven months. Splat. "I understand." "Do you?" "Of course. I'm making a bad thing worse. I understand." "I still love you." Liar! "I know. I love you, too.” "Okay. So I'll—I have to go."

Curbside Splendor September 2014 "I'll talk to you later." Whore. The comfort Jose finds in Annette’s big belly now is in knowing that many (most?) men will be repulsed by it, and this selfishness, this cruelty at the core of him, he realizes, may be one reason she left him. One morning Jose and Annette woke up in the middle of the relationship. The CD player was repeating the music from the night before. In some ways now the sex was not as voracious, especially first thing in the morning when they were both holding their breath. Until Annette, Jose had not really exhausted himself trying to impress a woman in bed. He had appreciated a woman who could fake well. Few women had been disappointed, though, because few had been willing to sleep with him. By the time he met Annette, to be fair, he had realized his unwillingness to please was less apathy than fear. What if he really tried to please a woman and found out he really was not good? Annette thought he was good. In bed he quickly learned what she liked and he took his time pleasing and being pleased. Perhaps because even early on he knew deep down the sex was the best part of the relationship. Afterward, they would eat breakfast and, depending on her mood, they would avoid or start a fight. In the middle of the relationship Jose would be showering or driving to work or watching one of his clients ramble on in the mirror and he'd think of Annette, then he’d have to excuse himself to call her for just a second. He needed to confirm her love. If she didn't answer he'd lose interest in his client’s hair, criticize himself in the mirror while a middle-‐aged shopping-‐mall princess confessed her lactose intolerance. There he was, too thin for Annette, too desperate in the eyes, a hair dresser. And there was the

Curbside Splendor September 2014 client below him, a variation on a theme, so vulnerable, her wet hair dangling like seaweed, the true head shape exposed, the bad effect on the face. Annette’s head shape seemed sculpted. She was even more attractive just out of the shower. Eventually Sammy, the receptionist, would approach Jose, touch his arm with her long, manicured fingers, and say to the client, “May I borrow him for just one minute?” Annette had called him back. “Oh,” he’d tell her. “I was just calling to say I love you.” He wanted to feel himself holding her hand in public. He was proud to see his face next to hers in pictures. Her indifference about putting her smelly feet in his lap: he could never be so tough. He wanted to share her toughness. He would. And he would share his best stuff, too—if only so he could be the last to take in-‐love pictures with her. About the same time, somewhere in the middle of the relationship, she punched him in the face. He'd provoked her, she made clear. He'd fallen asleep early on a Friday evening and didn't answer his cell when she, tipsy, called from their favorite bar to ask where the hell he was and what the hell was he doing and did he think this was how people treated people they claimed to care about. But even after he neglected her on a Friday night and made her look like a lonely sucker in front of all her friends, she apologized for hitting him in the face. Love. Soon, though, he encouraged her to do whatever she wanted. "Go out with your girlfriends tonight," he'd say. "Have fun." Or, "Go off and see your parents by yourself this weekend. Have fun." He understood a woman must feel free and trusted, especially if he ever expected her to allow a threesome. Still, she chose to spend her weekends and

Curbside Splendor September 2014 weeknights and lunches with him. God forbid he ever called to tell her he had made plans with one of his friends. "You're going out drinking with your ex and you expect me to be understanding?" "Ex, ex. Donna's like a sister." "A sister you fucked right before we started dating." "That was an accident." "Yeah, you were drinking with her.” If Jose were to hear someone tell him the true story of his relationship with Annette, he’d have trouble understanding why he is forlorn. If he were forced, say, to make a list of his and Annette's best times together, the best intervals longer than three hours in which they shared the same physical space, he himself would only come up with their first three dates. Unlike his other memories, which are framed by a certain tension because she is angry or about to be, the first and second dates are all hope and anticipation. On the first he watched her ass while she bowled. He couldn’t believe a woman with an ass like that was giving him a chance not to fuck everything up. He bought pitchers of beer before she could, and she insisted he quit paying for everything. She had put on black socks before the bowling shoes. When he'd picked her up she thrust the socks, balled up in her hand, to his face: "Do you know how amazing it is that I didn't forget to bring these?" Maybe Jose does understand why he’s forlorn.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 Later they went dancing. She was shy, barely moving her hips. "I like watching you," she said. When he returned with drinks she was talking to a short older man. "We're married," she said in Jose’s ear. "What?" "I had to tell him we're married. You’re my husband." He kissed her for the first time. "I've been wanting to do that." "Why?" He didn't answer. On the second date he drove them to a NASCAR race. She wore a large-‐brimmed straw hat. She had a hippy’s taste for the quaint and offbeat. The hat would have been ridiculous if she hadn't been wearing it, her green eyes looking at him from under the brim, her cutesy cartoon freckles. He'd drifted into the other lane. He parked as close to the track as possible, about a mile and a half from their seats. They were a quarter mile from the car when the rain started. They were half a mile from the track when lightning missed them. Sometime near the end of the race she started her period. They were in the bleachers. "I'm so embarrassed. You have to follow me down and tell me if it's on my pants." He followed closely, brushing grumbling shirtless men protecting their seven-‐dollar beers. "So I'm not getting laid," he said.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 "You never were." "Oh my God—it's all over you." She dropped to the stair at the end of the row. The men and their sleeveless sweaty women stared. As if praying Annette looked up at Jose and asked, "Are you serious?" Her eyes wide, her legs pressed together. "No." To avoid the punch she threw at his shin he stumbled backward down three of the aluminum stairs before finally saving himself with the handrail. By then her hand was over her mouth. Rednecks were hoo-‐hooing and saying very witty things. Their third date was spontaneous. He'd called her at about midnight on a Saturday. He knew she was out with her friends. He knew he was admitting want. He didn't care. "I'd really like to see you." "I'd like to see you, too," she replied. The bar was crowded. They sat on the patio. They talked about something neither of them would ever recall. They left for his apartment. At one point during sex she giggled. He stopped. "Don't stop, dumbass. I was almost there." "You giggled." He was mush.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 "That's what I do." He wanted to believe her, and he wanted to believe that when he went outside to smoke he cried because of the awful sublimity of consummated love and not because all other women he'd given bad sex had been polite enough not to giggle. Yesterday when his phone rang and the caller was Annette, doors fell down for miles around him. She was upset about some situation at work, her unreasonable boss. He formed caring questions and listened for a caring amount of time, then he talked her into letting him buy her a drink. Later they ended up at her house and, eventually, in her bed. He left before sunrise, worried he would hear in what she was saying what she wasn’t saying, see in her some sign of the feeling he had. - -

Curbside Splendor September 2014

John Sierpinski

has studied poetry at the universities of Wisconsin, Marquette, Iowa Workshop, and the Vest Conservatory for Writers. His poems have recently appeared in Backstreet Quarterly, Beginnings, California Quarterly, Crucible, Icon, North Coast Review, Snake Nation Review, Stoneboat, Tributaries, and Wisconsin People and Ideas. His work is also in two anthologies: “Echoes and Waves”, and “Come Be a Memoirist” from Baksun Books/Woodland Pattern. He was nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize.

“Under the Brooklyn Bridge” by Thomas Campone.

Curbside Splendor September 2014

Two Poems

by: John Sierpinski

Over the Road (After Mark Doty, “The Embrace”) In my recurring dream, you (my father) are alive again. I must have been mistaken, I think and hope. You were never sick or you were sick, but now you’re well. We are in our old house, too. It hasn’t yet been sold to the young couple with their jacked up pickup truck. In the dream, I am happy. There is the whoosh of a drained shot of whiskey. I can finally tell you about my work days, rednecks, and dusky women. You smile (lines appear at your mouth), nod and listen. The dreams don’t go there, but I remember when you told me stories about the Civilian Conservation Corps. How on the trip from Milwaukee to Park Falls, you fell asleep on the train and woke up in Madison. That amounted to two hundred miles you had to make up. You would have

Curbside Splendor September 2014 been in your twenties, more than ten years before I was born. I recall when Mom used to say, exasperated, “You two can never just talk. There’s always an argument.” There had been so much discord—my drinking, your old-‐ fashioned ideas. Your hard work, my wastrel ways. Then in 1976, just before you got sick, things were getting better, I thought. Do you remember how I’d get up at 4 a.m., working, again? You were thinking about retirement. You said to me, “John, once I pay off the car and the shack, I’m pulling the hook.” But now, even in dreams, your face is gaunt, its rubber-‐like smoothness resembles the face of a doll. Is it because of the pain killers, the morphine drip? One moment I want to know the details. Another moment, I want to ask you, “What disease?’ Before you were sick, you were handsome, trim, had slate blue eyes. Then you had a full head of steel gray hair, unlike the patched out and then hairless head you had before you died. In a matter of months,

Curbside Splendor September 2014 baggy clothes hung off your body and a ball cap nearly swallowed your head. In the dream, you were alive, but even then I knew it wasn’t real. You and I were two over the road truckers who passed each other by. We waved our hands out the windows. We reached out, using terry cloth wipes in the fog, the rain, the sleet, the snow. We did our best to clear the big side mirrors.

Curbside Splendor September 2014

To My Father’s Girlfriends Here’s to my father’s girlfriends, both agile and light, I hope they stay with him this sacred, reckless, night. My mother’s angry, her resentment fly, she scrubs, polishes, once again, her lacquered house—sucks dust and misery into her Hoover. I see her anguish while my father’s hard hands seek solace in enfolding legs, hot pomegranates. Here’s to my father’s girlfriends, nymphomaniacs, who prance before his eyes with their flat bellies, silicon tits. My mother’s at the porcelain altar, she tries to vomit her disease but there’s only the dirty, dry heaves. Her nightgown is torn, it looks like a burning cigarette. Hair on end, she sleeps on the couch, drinks non-‐stop. Here’s to my father’s girlfriends, who help him pray when he works in the warehouse. He imagines he is free. He disappears, passes his tongue over wet silk. He laughs with the heavy one whose hand hold his balls; he fondles the red head with freckled cheeks. My mother has bouts of sanity, but her black shade is drawn. Here’s to my father’s girlfriends, who help him decide borne of my mother’s booze, who dip their hands inside his pants. Here’s to the lover’s of my father’s ghost, haters of my mother’s lackluster passion. My father swallows the salt pill of duty as he lays out his work clothes. My mother hates not only the carpet, but the floor.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 Here’s to all of my father’s girlfriends. In this world you do not exist, but I see you when he stares at his cold cereal, his tortured bran. “Beautiful apparitions,” I say as he goes out the door, “please stay, follow wherever he goes. Stroke his slate hair, his calloused fingertips, he is losing you. Let him reach back, sane, into his reverie of you. Forever.”

-‐ -‐

Curbside Splendor September 2014

About the Artist Thomas Campone

Photographs from New York City I picked up my first digital SLR in 2005 as a hobby. I've always been interested in photography as a way to document travel and life events, but I quickly became more interested in creating art that I love. Little did I know that this simple purchase would end up changing the way I see and interact with the world around me. My photographic style attempts to show beautiful places and food in unique and fun ways. I'm inspired by strong subjects and I enjoy creating beautiful images that invoke emotion and intrigue with the viewer. Most importantly, I create images that I'm proud to hang on my wall and look at every day.

Curbside Splendor September 2014 www.curbsidesplendor.com