The Rialto Books Review vol.003 -- OUT NOW --

The Rialto Books Review vol.002 is now available (https://www.broadaxepublications.com/rialto-books-review/py9yjcnxaa7cp7vc0fo23ie5mtm4cu). The following pieces are printed in this edition.

:B an excerpt from a novel by Russell Block

“When this exodus began, he stood down in the driveway for the final time, where, light as the snow fell then, the toggle did nothing to overthrow the cover of snow accumulated throughout the night and recent week. At its bottom there had only widened a seam. And the general heat of the engine would be too long maturing, so Anthony uncovered ice by way of his sweater held at the sleeve wrist, which, once revealed from beneath the snow, this too the wipers merely glossed over ineffectively. Discovering no manufactured brush/scraper, within the backseat that had been piled heroically with his sketchbooks and various earthly possessions, a fractured compact disc was not hard to find. With it, he scraped away at the heavy impaction of ice and snow with some futility. As much as these streaks could relieve light into the cabin of this only car in the driveway, he swatched these down along his opposite arm. He frees up the driver’s side window some. His hat jauntily affixed like proud defiance in the cold, Anthony stands aside, neither having completed the whole windshield, nor should he have.

— I hope this isn’t symbolic. After the final sit of the morning, a coffee for which he was the only one to get himself up, and following their ultimate good-byes, Keith found himself stuck in the doorway for longer than expected. He wore only pajama bottoms and a badger t-shirt and overwatched the struggle while a Michael Bolton power ballad played from his phone until the whole scene became plain-old ripe for comment. Anthony, snow-covered, looked up, his attention then diverted from the task near enough to completed to stop. This last good look of the house he was leaving seems still the appropriate exit, made after he wiped the half CD’s edge on his pant and lingered long enough on the running board only to wave. On the verge of shivering, Keith was ready to shut out the cold but remained committed enough to not do so until Anthony was away. “

A Letter Never Accepted (Tom to Sara) by Tom Porter

Sara,

I frequently litter sleepless hours with a name and the starts to letters, these written only up to the point they wind up on my floorboards. I could not recall one actually getting done, and so they probably never were finished, and never sent either. Mostly, my sentiments tend to close off and seem meaningless well before Alana, Bronwyn, Sam, Pat, or Leviticus can have the pleasure. Our case is sure not to suffer the same fate. The pace of these things concludes some strange morning, unexpectedly. While, for now, the whole undertaking seems ridiculous, sacrificial, the emotional and thinking verge too unwieldy for words to weld. Still, day by day, and steadily, it will draw itself to a conclusion. You catch me now on the slight buzz of absinthe, at an absolute zoo of people, a Saturday mingling itself with a puddle of gin. The absinthe I had at home, and it was a long walk of thinking heavily that got me here. Somehow it might say everything to admit a letter feels like the only thread life could cling to. There are people upon peoples here. People here talk about bank accounts. They surround me, announcing the problems life holds for them. Within their menagerie, there are those apparently enamored in romances fantastic. I have on my own table pages littered from a previous letter. These previous, done on better paper, but wholly insufficient, hold a lucid feeling for you. Now, a wine might truncate my pace, dilute the buzzy word choice, and it will be the sanguine, 8 oz. punctuation to this first sitting, my preamble. Hello once more, Sara. I am stopped from going on because the unfortunate case with these kinds of things, letters, and not poems or physical presence, is that they will not be perfect. They rather suffer of a pace. My memories of you expound and expound, almost like a warning, because I need to drink to turn nights to day lately. My feelings are mixed, my capacity to understand them pure.