The Rialto Books Review vol.008 -- AVAILABLE NOW --
Physical issues of The Rialto Books Review vol.008 are now available and can be purchased here.
The Rialto Books Review vol.008 includes Nocturne on a Public Square by Jason Neibergall, After the Flea Circus by E.L. Hugh, Veritas! Act I Scene I by Russell Block, and a poem by Alex Ranieri.
Nocturne on a Public Square by Jason Neibergall
Commensurate with the painter’s twenty-third year, the blooms of nascent hillside dawning just, as though to match the driver’s tired eye, those first summery months heralded providence. It was a portly dream, the dream of a portly fellow, a would be epicurean, if but he took enjoyment in much and plenty, but for whom much and plenty eluded appreciation. The harbor town’s café with a French menu was to be his staging ground for escape, and his recent mornings have there commenced. As Earl weighed his faults with the liver and toast in his other hand, an overdose’s anguished indifference is brought forth from the restroom. The first responders ending their lengthy disturbance for a calm to momentarily pervade, they then produce the user, unconscious, or, worse yet, dead, for all the café to see. Turning from his savaged and various plates, on whose glossy extents the contents are disfigured, Earl recognizes the individual in a trance, the head lolling and beatification undetectable in his look, for that same and somewhat derelict personage that struck up a conversation with Earl outside. Dyspepsia brings a closed fist to the diner’s horror as Earl realizes the import of that conversation. Mulling it, the scraps of dishes very thoroughly enjoyed up to that point are enjoyed again.
After the Flea Circus by E.L. Hugh
When this exodus began, he stood down in the driveway for the final time, where, light though the snow then fell, the toggle did nothing to dislodge last night’s snows or those accumulated on the windshield throughout the recent week. At its bottom there had only widened a seam. Its would be driver appeared again and appeared consternated alongside the car. A brief study of the fleece made clear that the running engine shrugged nature off too tediously. The impetus of that morning would truck no delays. And so, impatiently, X. dragged snow by dint of his sweater held at the sleeve wrist, revealing ice which, once the armfuls were disposed off, 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. Insofar as these scratches brought the interior cabin of that only car in the driveway into relief, shedding light in beams on the leather of the seats, and swatching the accumulations of the disc down along the opposite arm of the sweatshirt, X. only rendered himself all the blurrier. He frees up the driver’s side window some. His hat jauntily affixed like proud defiance in the cold, X. stands aside, neither having completed the whole windshield, nor feeling he should have.
Veritas! Act I Scene I by Russell Block
Spencer. How say they? To push this board into place upon its casters was issueless as prayer, but the pack looks, by your perusal, another burden altogether.
Cassidy. This syllabus is insult.
Spencer. Tell us, what are we, scholars exceptional, to divine of this void upon its wheels by milky stalk and with a native, scientific wit?
Cassidy. I am elsewhere.
Spencer. Apply yourself, lest you leave me ponder two mysteries, what we are to accomplish here, and what bothers else bother you.
Cassidy. Nothing, nothing.
Spencer. To adopt the manner of a closed book in your self-same idleness is, as standing water, injurious. That which is in essence nourishment will breed ills if indolence is not translated into courses and furls.
A poem by Alex Ranieri
We muddled through the ice and snow;
We had left our comrades long ago
Under the subtle and shifting sands,
Down by the wine-dark sea.
