The New Formalist

Poetry Editor
Leo Yankevich

Publication:
The New Formalist is published biannually
in spring and fall
in PDF format.

Submissions:

lyankevich@gmail.com

Send no more than 5 poems in either the body of an email message
or in a single attached file (RTF, MS Word, or Open Office).

© 2006 by respective authors.


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Mark Allinson

Revolutionary II

Yes, I see them standing there
with white, metallic, tin-slit lips,
insisting that they care, they care
aggressively, with hands on hips.

Caryatids with such a task
to carry heaven on their head,
their face a metal ideal mask,
fixed and pale and dull as lead.

They yearn, aspire, and seek above,
ignoring all beneath their feet
and name their ideal vision “love”
when it is merely self-deceit.

They know precisely what “should be”,
and what is “proper” “good” and “right”
and since their only skill’s to see
they’re planning to out-law the night.

I see them, here, as clear as you
saw them eighty years ago,
they have not changed, they will not do
a thing to move, they cannot flow

and ripple with a living pulse
of energy, changing course,
bounding, leaping true and false,
instinctive as a wild horse.

I see them holding up their sky
of stoney heaven, painted blue,
but when it cracks and pieces fly
they’ll envy Lords of Hell like you.

William Orem

Ash

At ten I touched a finger to a white stove ring
to see if pain would come.
So much of what you told me was a lie.

Dear Dad, there is no resurrection by a shining King;
your body ash we sifted into pools
and tributaries of the Chesapeake. I saw that tide

transport you out to rippled nothingness,
your form as gossamer as early Spring, that brow
whose blankness was more frightening than fury.

The day we let you go was calm. The world
wherein all love that ever was takes place
surrounded us, and bore you down. And now

your shadow’s length, I find, lies nowhere on my floor.
How shall I lie? To claim our dissolution had not started long before?

Washington DC 1979

The autumn wind sluiced through the homeless boys
where I was young. You must in them
see God, the Jesuits explained. As in the mugger Christ.
Christ chased me with a swinging chain. He took
my watch and twelve year-old repose; bent
this shrieking lady’s windshield with concrete. At night
we went out to the trestle rails, far from the city’s fright
and clutch. Safe in that weedy dark
we’d leap the lines from moony steel to steel
and dance upon the ties,
shout out the names of passing cargo cars
and, fearless now, taunt fate’s approaching wheel—

to tumble always from the final light,
those wondrous rising beams.

Leo Yankevich

The July Sun Over Lebanon

She hears bombs raze the nunnery.
She hears F-16s on their way
back to Israel, to reload
new bombs sent from America.
Blinding smoke burns in her eyes
and shrouds the limbs of terrorists,
boys and girls from grammar school
who in the spring first learned to count.

K.A. Hays

Epithalamium

Fall. We walk the forest, trace the rise
of color in the hills. Out past the birches
(gold of harvest, gold to stir the sky
into its blessing), pines stand firm—

they hold their hue. Today we praise the blend
of maples, joy, that coppery burn that leaps
before the eye. But also we join hands
to welcome winter, when the orange retreats

and green—that constant, love—wins back the gaze.
Today we vow to walk in winter, teamed
and tough, that we may see the seasons age
with all the grace of pines. To shed, to bend,

to know these woods. And in our years, to be
as grateful—as we are today—for green.

Intrusion

Spring’s first chives, those slim insurgents, stab
winter’s sticks; the old hive’s sloughing layers
greyly down, drifting, flinging a fine ash

over the compost, steaming mess, eater
of anything thrown. Even inanimate
junk has an urge to control, seems to care

how it powers and whom. But maybe not—
hard to tell when the mind inserts itself
everywhere, looking for likeness. Say we let

the old nest be only a bulbous shell
abandoned, honeycomb caught dangling half
out in the air, just substance, nothing else—

even then one imagines the bees, back
when the hive sang honey, slower, golder
than truth, and the self reaches, tastes, and is sad.

As If a Lapse of Self Were Likely

Here the flat-cropped clouds. A heckled ridge,
some storm-warped pines, a grosbeak. A separateness

to things: a branch, a boulder. Here the wind,
the summit—this. What else could we expect

but such a view? Some mental height?
Ridiculous—but we've come far. I'd like to see

the mountain shrug its firs off—some mute
abandonment to air. A rock, a tree's

contagion. Familiar need, to be unbound
from all this wreckage—the hemmed in cliffs and steep collapses

of the mind—to want confluence, hunkering down
in someone else. In thinner air, it's as if a lapse

of self were likely. It is not. We stand
with shoulders touching. Look at this strange land.

The Seasoning

Rain’s undressing the maples. We walk back
to the felled ash hauling tools, boots mucked
with grit, soles sunk in the moldering rug
beneath the beeches. They hold some color: a gold

that clings through storms. As if you know them well
you touch the lengths of ash, limbed and bucked
months back. “Wet through,” you say, prop up
a round and lift the maul. It drops, serene

as time. My task’s in piling pieces up
like sleepers in a crowded place. You're patient,
know the need to work: last days to save
the wood before the freeze, before the grim

pocked nights when ice-cased twigs snap off
and even the bears bed down. Our pile’s tall.
We spread the tarp on it, blue dome to the fuel
that would go rotten otherwise, bolt

it down with granite slabs and leave the ash
to age as one would leave a plum unripe
in sun. If we could stay as we are now—

two hats, four gloves, four boots soaked almost
black, some underwear, two pairs of pants
that keep the creases knees made in them, slung

from beams above the stove, our bodies close
as bowls—impossible. To lie in blankets,
drying, beyond change. Even now
we hear it, the wild predictable tap, the sleet
that tells us through the roof that it is here,

that we are seasoning wood, our tarp
is thin, and may not hold.

Jared Carter

The Solitude of the Soul

Silence made tangible, serenely caught
In bounded space. Pure form revealed, stripped bare,
Bereft of guises and disguises. Ought
Matters not, nor might have been. They wear
Each other’s presence like a flower, yet find
No comfort in the vine of outstretched hands
That draws them close. No mortal sleep could bind
Such distances. In dreams, we understand
But cannot have. Awake, we strive to know
But still must journey on. Yet here, a flame
Moves warily among these polished forms,
Seeking through art what life cannot bestow—
The moment come again, the touch, the name.
As lightning’s torch is herald to the storm.

Seventh Decade

It is the broken sinew, and the crash
Of bone, that signal how the fire will burn
More brightly now, and yet leave only ash
And embers banked against the day’s return.
Within the narrow confines of the heart,
Where random choices come to sudden fusion,
There must be room for darkness, else the art
Of making whole engenders mere illusion.
The wound that does not heal, the ivory bow—
Approach these gifts with dread. They signify
A sacrifice that points us through the maze.
All too familiar—that we think we know
The way, or that this moment cannot die.
Verse lasts, but fire fades, and so do days.

Wiley Clements

Aubade

Coming to consciousness
long before dawning,
listen to tinnitus,
singing cicadas.

Contented to cancel
the dolor of dreaming,
and grateful to showers
that patter the shingles,

O would that we never
awoke to anxiety;
rain and cicadas
sufficient society.

For Trumbull Stickney

Poet, sojourner in death, life’s intermezzo,
I would you knew that on my table lie
these many copies of your “In Ampezzo”
ready to rise and fly

to many a place where friends in summer wander,
to whom I send for purest pleasure’s sake
your pines by sullen coasts, your oleander
reddening on the lake.

The Great Boulder, Colorado, Flood

In spring of eighteen ninety-four
the Rockies danced in driving rain
a dozen days and nights or more.

The Flatirons leaned above the plain
where Boulder lay like an innocent lamb.
The flood rolled down like a runaway train
and struck like a battering ram.

Not a barn or bridge or dwelling place
where Boulder Creek went raving by
but fell before the torrent's race,
and it took two years for the town to dry.

Chickens had to swim or die
as people learned to roost in trees
and sows taught piglets how to fly.

Facts as true as any of these
will spin from history’s centrifuge
till nature trumps our memories
in another hundred year deluge.

Daphne

No one was so tender,
the simple length and green.
No one now so slender,
fading, sad, and lean.

A warm, wooden heart
palpitates within;
branches spread apart
to gather of the wind.

Tom Riley

Quiet Time

The noisy children made her sigh or scream.
The quiet children haunted her for ages.
It was so loud, it couldn’t be a dream.
The noisy children made her sigh or scream.
They seemed to work together as a team,
to work her into thirteen different rages.
The noisy children made her sigh or scream.
The quiet children haunted her for ages.

Sally Cook

Another Species

Each time you felt some shame you could confess
Those sins you had committed, but, instead,
You whispered a revision, something less,
In someone’s ear in yet another bed.

That is to say you were quite off your head,
And took it out on everyone you knew.
Your failings never flagged; your heart seemed dead
As each sly dance of courtship went askew.

Tangled and driven, thoughtless, always you
Would promise all, returning nothing much
But pain. Still, there were those quite eager to
Receive this bounty, once your fickle touch
Had been desired. Fat, balding, only then
Too late you wept for things that might have been.

The Bookkeeper & The Barkeep

Light dims at quarter to three, and the sun
Leaves you in the bar at the close of day.
I labor, billing the ladies, for fun
They’ve had as they passed through their latest phase.

As I count the costs of their gluttony,
Total the tax, then politely send bills
It is always just a quarter to three
When the fat birds hop on the windowsills.

You work the bar as the members arrive.
Lonely wives chitchat, come on to you there.
Why do we do this? It keeps us alive,
In a sense. I could use a drink down where
You are in the bar, and I’ll get me one,
Soon as that drunk and these bar bills are done.

Joel Lamore

Wraxen

Wraxen: overstretched, strained.
—Brewer’s Dictionary

The wheel on a child’s bike, spokes slightly bent;
an ankle, broken once, and never quite
the same; or any mind once innocent
can take us home again, though we must fight
the more a pedal's stubborn catch, or limp,
diverting weight and torque away from scarred
and painful joints, or take firm hold and crimp
the fairy's lacy wings, and do what's hard.

The world is harsh to broken things, it's true,
but tolerates the unbroken but impaired.
The lizard on the wall, it’s tail askew,
for instance. Notice those scales, fine crepe
along the tail so bright and free of wear,
which tell of danger, once, and then escape.

Taxonomy

Hold the page up to the light to check,
and classify it as invertebrate.
It’s flexible and spineless, kin to sponge,
or flatworm, yet, a thing indefinite.

It has no mouth that can be seen, nor senses.
The stroke or prick of pen, a cut or tear
provokes no motion, not a wince or ripple:
insensate, then, and fed by light or air.

One cannot tell the dorsal from the ventral;
its body’s thin and flat and terminates
in four right angles (few specimens will differ)
and, to the naked eye, each edge is straight.

Its coloring can vary, though this one,
like most, is an albino, which suggests
its kind spent eons sunk where darkness reigns,
and by forgetting light, the darkness dispossessed.

We’d have to make the thing, had nature not,
so well it bears the burden of our thoughts.

David Castleman

Darwin’s boner

Throughout fierce hours our brute forefather won
this crowning hope, translation of the son,
thumped his broad chest, & when his woods had rung
with bellowing preludes of his thundering tongue,

with hopes half-born, with burnng tears half-shed,
bowed his terrible abandoned head,
& arms uncouth, & knees unfit to kneel,
wailed ineffable ultimate appeal.

Mad heavens heard, himself it was who gave
a gift who made him master & not slave,
& in this angst-writ horror of his fate
his primal wail broke half-articulate,

as a weird flame, past knowing, past control,
gathered through eyes, & blazed, & was a soul.

the crucial stigmata

Our goat’s been tethered through the middle-east
diabolically where the tiger ceased

worrying pathways toward the pit
the goat and we had dug for it

and now nothing remains but to feast, feast.

Christian myth says hell’s acoming.

Who finds no possibility he might
admire the imbeciles who run these things
my understanding’s disrespecting brings
niggling compunctions I should feel contrite.

These evilest of evil criminals
whose pursed effectual spouses share the apt
and garrisoned spoilings, nicely contrapt
disparagement of truth to praise the false.

Individually speaking, a robot
whose mumbling of psychophagy contrives
to build itself existence through our lives
understands the individual is not.

Masculine competitiveness is his
holiest holy and God’s abandoned
his virtual morality that’s atoned
for any of his early decencies.

Richard O’Connell

Lives of the Poets

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was a hell of a lay.
One day like a queen
She took on 17.
Bishop* had to wait
For the flock to pass the plate.



Robert Frost
Liked to get lost
In woods full of snow
Drinking Old Crow
(But sober or drunk
Was a bit of a skunk).

Ernest Hemingway
Was definitely not gay.
No bigger macho
Ever put on a poncho
And uncorked a louder Ole!

Rudyard Kipling
Was never a stripling.
He was born with a sash
And imperial moustache
But fell into disapprobation
When he wrote “The Knight of the King’s Castration.”*

Thomas Hawks

Shooting the Moon

Yahtzee and Screw Your Neighbor. 31
My grandmother coughs and antes in her nickel
As the campfire cracks and pops, a flicker
Of burn still live somewhere in the spent pine.
For hours outside our trailer laughing women
Have called and passed. They’ve knocked and taken tricks
Around a little candle, which attracts
Stray moths with dark wings stiff as drying cotton:
A fabric from the sky—spun, measured, clipped.
Or maybe that’s just women shuffling cards,
That noise out in the dark like sharpened knives
Shearing the frayed threads loose. Maybe they’ve kept
Playing the hands they’ve practiced all their lives:
Spite and Malice. 13. Bullshit. Hearts.

Arlene

Outside your ward, unsteady with clematis
Plank fences sway. A high tide eddies in
Through hissing rocks and sparkling breaks its lattice
Along the shore. Tonight a hurricane
Unravels storm fronts over the Atlantic
Like dancers’ sleeves and, when the ward nurse comes,
We talk about the sky, how near and dark,
How strong winds turn before they’re given names.

It’s hard to fathom. Even in Tallahassee
Where you were supposed to wait for nothing
The sky still darkens, mothers say we’ll see
To restless children, who see the water glittering
While one more body’s dropped beneath our talk
The way a sun burns through the ocean’s silk.

Nativity Scene

A blue spruce lets its needles drop
along the floor. They’re dry and sharp,
a rain of little turquoise pins
falling among ceramic kings.

Above their heads an angel’s traced
the small hot bulb pierced through her waist
and tries again to sing. Again
her lungs fill up with porcelain.

And glass thin as a fish’s skull
emerges wet and beautiful,
emerges like an infant star.
Shepherds below sing gloria.

I check my son’s quick breath and pulse.
His tender, star-shaped fontanels
begin to close. So do my heart’s
bare chambers, terrorized to quartz.

Annabelle Moseley

Villanelle: On Watching The Sunset in Assisi

The disbelief of beauty’s strange effects
That seized me in Assisi made me pause.
The willing loss of knowing what comes next

Took me by surprise. A hilltop sunset wrecks
With soft determination, and because
The disbelief of beauty’s strange effects

Was anesthesia, sinking orange flecks
Of color numbed like Novocain on jaws.
I willed the loss of knowing what comes next.

It was enough to stand there. Purple necks
Of clouds spread out, en masse; this was the cause
Of disbelief. And beauty’s strange effects

Can choke a person. (Sometimes you expect
Your splendor opens doors-or doors are closed by flaws.)
I willed the loss of knowing what comes next:

The one I’ll love, which poems will rest in texts
To be remembered. This sunset was the cause:
The disbelief of beauty’s strange effects,
The willing loss of knowing what comes next.

Waking in Umbria

Carducci wrote a poem about the place,
And called it the green heart of Italy—
This Umbria—I thought I’d disagree,
When we arrived at night. The landscape’s face
Was darkness without streetlights, showed no trace
Of pulsing color—just obscurity.
This shadow spot, due east of Tuscany
Would have to hang in mystery for the space

Between sunset and dawn. I rose at nine
And walked the lime and olive-colored earth,
The artichoke, the undulating land
Enfolded in the rolling Apennines.
I passed through chestnut groves, and felt the worth
Carducci wrote of here; deeper than planned.

Umbrian Pastoral

A winter morning, ripe with warmth and sun,
The roosters, restless, pacing in their coop
And I out walking separate from the troop
I’d traveled with, because I had begun
To tire of their gossiping. I shun
The artless conversations of a group
Conceived in idleness, the gutless goop
That with the aimed precision of a gun

Will shoot, yet always miss the truth it sought.
The valley of Perugia was stretched
Before me, fields of farmland, gold and green,
The nearby church bells rang; their sound was caught
And spread upon the air, a pureness etched
With accurate precision, though unseen.

On The Expensive Shops in Venice

The commerce in the bright and garish stalls
Of gleaming masks and jewelry, souvenirs,
Is offset by the fading plaster walls,
The eyes of rounded windows, shutter ears
That hang open, or broken, and take in
The pastel dusk of sunlight, winter air,
The sidewalk cobblestones that stretch grey skin
Beneath the painted ruin and disrepair.
Venice is falling, sinking every day.
You feel a burial under your feet,
The unavoidable but slow decay
That lingers in the loveliest of streets.
This city sells itself with its last breath,
But I am purchased by its quiet death.

David Castleman

Divine Courtesies Are Affectations

Books!

Women are the Strangest Animals

Joseph S. Salemi

Pusillanimous Plainness:

Why Modern Wordsmiths are Wimps

David Castleman

William Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT

Leo Yankevich

Jared Carter, CROSS THIS BRIDGE AT A WALK, Wind Publications, 600 Overbrook Drive, Nicholasville, KY 40356, 110pps, $15.

Contributors’ Notes

Mark Allinson is a teacher and writer, living on the coast south of Sydney, Australia. Mark has published poems in many small magazines and e-zines, and has recently published a chapbook at Modern Metrics, entitled Blue Glass Cities.

William Orem’s collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award in 2000, formerly given to Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Alice Munro, Richard Ford and others. His poetry and fiction have appeared in over 60 journals, including Sou’Wester, Alaska Quarterly Review and the Princeton Arts Review, and he has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Leo Yankevich’s poems have recently appeared in Chronicles, Blue Unicorn, Iambs & Trochees and Ship of Fools. He lives with his wife and three sons in Gliwice, Poland.

K.A. Hays’ poetry and verse translations have appeared most recently in The Hudson Review and American Literary Review, and are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Florida Review, New Orleans Review, and other magazines. She is at work on a first book of poems.

Jared Carter’s poems and stories have appeared online in Astropoetica, Boheme Magazine, Eclectica, Melic Review, Plum Ruby Review, Red River Review, The Scream Online, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His fourth collection of poetry, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, is available from Wind Publications in Kentucky.

Wiley Clements lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in retirement after a long career—first as a military journalist, later as a developer of health maintenance organizations (HMO’s). His collection of poems, Yesterday or Long Ago, was published by Clock & Rose Press in July 2004.

Tom Riley has published well over 700 poems in venues ranging from The Lyric to Light to Anglican Theological Review. He teaches Classical languages and English literature in Napa, California.

Sally Cook is a painter and poet who lives in Silver Creek, New York.

Joel Lamore’s work has most recently been published in such magazines as The NeoVictorian/Cochlea and Harp-strings. His poems have also recently appeared in an anthology of Southern California poets entitled Wednesday.

David Castleman lives in Dayton, Washington. His poems, tales, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of small press magazines since the early 1970s.

Richard O’Connell lives in Hillsboro Beach, Florida. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Margie, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Formalist, Light, etc. His most recent collections are American Obits, Fractals and Dawn Crossing.

Thomas Hawks’ work has appeared previously in Antioch Review, The Literary Review, the Seneca Review, Western Humanities Review and Image: A Journal of Religion and the Arts. He recently completed a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and he currently teaches high school in Plainfield, New Jersey.

Annabelle Moseley is Poet-in-Residence at the Stevenson Academy of Fine Arts in Oyster Bay, New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Texas Review, The Lyric, Poetry Nottingham International, and The Seventh Quarry, among others. Birnham Wood Graphics recently published a chapbook of her poetry entitled The Moon Is A Lemon.

Joseph S. Salemi teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University, and in the Classics Department of both Hunter College and Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. His work has appeared in over eighty journals and literary magazines in the United States and in Britain.