HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL BY EMMA SIMON

HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL BY EMMA SIMON

by | Mar 23, 2017 | Poems in The Rialto

HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL   by Emma Simon Paint blue icing on her fingertips, fingers that could snap with cold, dipped into fridges and glass chillers placing cockleshell cakes in pretty rows. Tie back her hair, dress her in sexless tabards, dab with jam. Press...
Home by Neetha Kunaratnam

Home by Neetha Kunaratnam

by | Mar 10, 2017 | Poems in The Rialto

HOME by Neetha Kunaratnam June 23, 2016   I Go Home. We voted leave… Her indignant jaw trembled as she seethed, and the deadpan response I might have mustered froze on my lips, as she brandished a crumpled flyer and unleashed its litany of stats. I’m going I said and...
TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by Ben Wilkinson

TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by Ben Wilkinson

by | Feb 8, 2017 | Poems in The Rialto

[See end of post for image credit] To David Foster Wallace   by Ben Wilkinson Since I was old enough to know myself I’ve been trying to figure it out – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing, like half the time I’d chuck it all in; throw...
Dragged Under by Ian Humphreys

Dragged Under by Ian Humphreys

by | Dec 6, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

DRAGGED UNDER   by Ian Humphreys So many wet shaves in a lifetime. How many thousands and thousands?  So many ………….rituals at dawn’s bleached-bone altar, a falter of sharpened steel on skin. So much water               feel it slide...
A WITNESS by Amy Carrington

A WITNESS by Amy Carrington

by | Sep 16, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

A WITNESS   by Amy Carrington I’ve been watching the letterbox, I’ve been watching her at the letterbox. Her arm is stuck in the rectangle, but not stuck getting out she can’t seem to get it any farther in. A gloss-eyed pot fox peers through the...
FIGHT SONG by Paula Bohince

FIGHT SONG by Paula Bohince

by | Sep 1, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

FIGHT SONG  by Paula Bohince August 2014 A crisis on a monitor, and there’s this football field, white chalk formalizing grass, a spongy black track where I walk off my no-baby weight. A deadline has passed, so a journalist will leave this world violently as I go...
Tristia by Jacqueline Saphra

Tristia by Jacqueline Saphra

by | Jul 27, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

Tristia   by Jacqueline Saphra My friend, we’ve been anchored here for years arguing the toss: semi-colon versus the long dash, our views on Ovid’s Tristia though I haven’t read it, nor have you – and as the room rocks gently underneath us you pour for me a rare...
The Booze by Charlie Bird

The Booze by Charlie Bird

by | Jun 19, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

THE BOOZE   by now, the booze is you, you are the booze, mid-rant you stand up too fast, keel over, turn your ankle and I’m supposed to help you up. Oh! the heat and stench of you cursing the world, cursing me, you burst into tears, blurt, ‘I’m...
A challenge and response

A challenge and response

by | May 9, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

A challenge In your editorial to Rialto 84 you challenged your readers to challenge you and Fiona. Taking you at your word, here’s my challenge. Your Editorial vaunts the magazine’s eclecticism. What struck me however was not the wide ranging diversity of the poems in...
Sanctuary by Kate White

Sanctuary by Kate White

by | Mar 4, 2016 | Poems in The Rialto

Sanctuary   by Kate White I’d like to be able to say this is an epiphany but it’s not. I want to press on home. I’m anointed by the light of the phone box, looking out on hard rain, the closed off-licence. It’s clean of cards and dry enough...