The New Formalist

Poetry Editor
Lamon Cull

Managing Editor
David Castleman

Contributing Editor
Jerry Jenkins

The New Formalist appears in January and July as a Web publication and once a year as a conventional print journal. A two issue subscription to the latter is $20. Please make all checks payable to:

David Castleman
Box 792
Larkspur, CA 94977-0792

Please submit no more than 6 poems at a time. Kindly paste your poems (plain text) onto the body of your E-mail message. Our E-mail address is:

thenewformalist@lycos.com

We do not encourage snail-mail submissions, but if you do not have access to a computer, kindly submit your work to the address below:

The Editors,
The New Formalist
Box 792
Larkspur, CA 94977-0792

© by respective authors.


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Joseph S. Salemi

PERSUASION

The goddess of convincing (among the Greeks)
Is Peitho, and her name means I persuade.
Her presence, when a lover pleads and speaks,
Can grease the skids while he chats up a maid.

Lawyers, politicians, and such scum
All worship Peitho in specific styles;
The hopeful candidate is never glum
If Peitho keeps the electorate in smiles.

The advertising agent and the prof
Spend hours begging Peitho for hot tips,
While heavyweights of industry will doff
Their hats to those with Peitho on their lips —

And all to make a herd of witless dolts
Give up their money, freedom, or their votes.

POETRY TODAY

Since Baudelaire and Verlaine, the field has shrunk:
Mere feelings, hokum, moral cant, and whining.
In greater ages, poetry was drunk
On Bacchic dance, blood lust, occult divining,
The savagery of Swift, the wit of Byron,
Poe’s death wish, Dowson’s pedophilic viols;
The obscene lisping of a sluttish siren
Formed Wilde and Swinburne’s Dionysian styles.

No tawdry brothels now, nor spired cathedrals:
Just thatched mud huts for lemmings to call home—
Epiphanies of small, pathetic people
As pallid as a cracked and sunbleached bone.
Today verse wears the regulation dress
Of inoffensive bourgeois politesse.

DON JUAN ADVISES A BEGINNER

Speak softly, as if words gave just a portion
Of what you felt. This stirs a latent urge
That leaves the girl off guard, despite her caution.

Let tone and phrase and accent work to purge
The lady of each fretful fear and qualm.
Your smiling reassurance, like a balm,
Should soothe the prickly irritant of doubt.
Quite sooner than you think, she’s on the verge,
Though at the end you’ll note a sudden surge
Of false resistance—quickly put it out
With one conclusive, unexpected kiss.

This labor done, proceed to take the wench
No matter if she’s Mrs., Ms., or Miss—
At that point she’s too compromised to blench.

SICILIAN BEACHHEAD

He had to kill her, though it was not planned—
He crawled up that warm beach at night, in war.
Who could foresee a young girl on the sand,
A bicyclist along the moonlit shore?

She saw him. If he let the girl go free
She might raise an alrm. He was afraid.
The blued-steel bayonet came out, and he
Stabbed deep and hard, the full length of its blade.

Years later, troubled by a nagging ghost
Of doubt, he’d tell himself there was no blame.
If she had been a sentry at a post
No question that he would have done the same.

But every night he felt her fragile breath—
He languished, pined, and drank himself to death.

Wiley Clements

MILITARY JOURNALIST

On the road outside Inchon,
in nondescript attire,
part G.I., part civilian,
less likely to draw fire,
heading for the line,
first horror that I saw:
a charbroiled North Korean
sprouting from the maw
of a rocket-shattered Russian
tank, T-thirty-four;
black flower in the sun,
the first of many more.

The next I came upon
I had not seen die.
There beside his gun,
a bullet through his eye,
a boy no older than
myself, his skull a flower,
petals of bone and skin.
A momentary shower
had washed the brain within
white as ivory:
I stared and then walked on;
he rose and walked with me.

Burned and shattered flowers,
young men who had no say,
dead soldiers, theirs and ours,
walk with me today.

Leo Yankevich

BILLIE

I felt it in her body loves ago.
Call it what you will: her psyche, soul,
essence, the ghost I never got to know
that haunts me down my later years. A fool,
I wanted flesh, her buttocks and the small
of her back bent underneath my thrusts, her red
dress open, chestnut hair against the wall,
creamy face pressed deep into the bed
till climax and exhaustion merged with dawn.
I could please her, but could not keep her long.
Three binges later she was packed and gone,
her scent still married to my skin, her song
so like a sparrow’s in my trembling hand,
a song I could not free, or understand.

PAPA’S DYING

Visionary underneath his pain,
he lies there, staring blankly at my mother,
cancer spread from his liver to his brain.
She tries to tell him all the latest news,
mentions I’m in flight, and that my brother
and sisters are beside his bed. They smother
him with their grief. My brother offers booze.
But papa calls out to his long dead father,
points to his own bare feet with his cane,
and asks them to take off his heavy shoes.

OBITUARY

Today I leaf through the obituaries
and find out who has died among the famous—
an actress, doctor, and philanthropist—
the stories of their lives take up a page.

But I recall my neighbour, Betty Amos,
who, with beads wrapped round a gnarled fist,
tried to cure cancer with Hail Marys,
never letting faith succumb to rage.

There is no mention of her name at all,
no words relating kindnesses and deeds,
how she brought us apples in the fall,
and fed the hungry pigeons pumpkin seeds.

Mark Allinson

FLAME FLOWERS

Within the window’s green and blue
the flame-tree’s scarlet flares like hate.
Her seed-embedded fruit pods grew
black bats who were the summer's bait.

Such neon-spiked display implies
volcanic urge of savage lies
just below the safe serene
of seeming tranquil blue and green.

Upon the sign-post squints a crow
at every lurching butterfly,
his black eye shouts a mortal “no”
and never blinks or winks a why.

Search and seek to find this why
but never will you satisfy
the cat down-hunkered in the grass
for gentle blue birds, should they pass.

THE NATURAL BORN BASTARD

There never was a reason why
the silverfish can never fly;
though it seems a perfect beetle
its problem’s not exo-skeletal.

The fault lies in the primal flash,
this world of which is fading ash,
for when the primal oodad popped
some plans for wings were simply dropped.

And as the loaded die was cast
the laws for missing wings were passed;
no use your bitter hows and whys,
we cannot all be butterflies.

So never try to glue false wings
on sly destructive creepy things;
some hole-darn housewives miss their fate
without a silverfish to hate.

THE DARK RAY

In the heat of sparkling days we loved to burst
the blown up paper-bags of clouds afloat,
and shred them in the ribboned pools of light:
among the rocks we did our very worst.

All summer long we wallowed in our sport,
exploding mirrored clouds with body-bombs;
well buoyed upon the ample seas of time,
we never thought we ever could be caught;

until, I glimpsed below, that shocking ray,
which like an arrow head of poison black,
slid fast below our treading, tensing soles;
I still recoil to think of it today.

And every day I see it sliding fast,
in gulfs of dreams that make me swim awake,
and in the mirrored pools of tv screens,
the ray has come to stay—will not swim past.

Michael Dobberstein

FINDING THE BEAR

You have to look to see the bear in winter.
By that I mean that you will have to want
To find her, must know when it’s time to enter
The woods bristling just beyond the road.

The woods will want to pull you in, won’t they.
There’s something about the jagged line, dense
Against the sky, the crossed shapes of gray,
The browns and yellows, a last leaf, hanging.

Leaves lie thick and dry on the ground.
So you will have to move slowly, watching
For branches, rocks, hearing just the sound
Of your own walking, your breath white in air.

The air in winter barely holds the light.
Or holds it so easily, it seems to slip
Past you, doesn’t it, bending the line of sight
Inward toward the trees, the dense brush.

You’re sure the bear is somewhere in the trees.
Birds, never many in winter, are quiet
And nothing stirs but you, not even a breeze
Slides across the stillness in the woods.

The stillness, you think, moves with the bear.
You imagine her erect, lifting herself
Upward, her body rising in the air
Like smoke, a gray shadow in the trees.

The trees themselves are brown and smoky black.
And winter colors stay quiet, don’t they,
The deep reds and ambers, the subtle track
Of mossy green along the dark wood.

You know the bear could be as dark as wood.
And looking for her in the ruck of branches
You think about the road where you could
Be, close to houses, the smooth fences.

You hope that she’ll be close, after all.
Close enough so you can see her eyes,
Winter-clear and depthless, flat as the wall
Of sky rising behind her, behind you.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Two a.m. is a hole drilled in the night.
Utter silence. What woke you?
Not the distant train whose whistle sighed
Softly for a moment in the room

And entered your dream just when sleep
Stopped. Not the sound of traffic on the highway
Sunk in the tunnel of night, that retreats
Behind the silence. Not the voices raised

Somewhere down the street, the car door
Slammed shut. Everyone’s finally left
And you sense the last ripple against the shores
Of the night fade, the farthest star shift

In its course and pause. The moon leans
In the window and you float on the dark lake
Of the soundless world, neither at rest or at peace.
You know you won’t sleep. You can only wait.

Ernest Hilbert

STUDY OF CLOUDS AT HAMPSTEAD

A man seen nodding slowly at a desk,
His shirt gone to ripples and shadow stain,
Half dreaming that blank moment of the risk
He takes shielding himself from the rain

And sky of what remains, while screen menu
Beckons with automatic click and stirred
Pixels, but not that of cloud or blue
That shapes all above, and leaves him interred.

ROOMS BY THE SEA

Our homes always faced the exiting sun,
Looked on bay and sound, never an ocean;
And though it stretched endlessly north as planned
We knew our base of sand was an island.

MELENCOLIA I

Though what remains is less than what was sought,
Less contained in the round of day and sea,
It is more refrain than chorus, no verse,
Lost din where words fell clear, short of a thought.

So this is what happens. So this is it.
Each book weighs down a pound more on the spine,
And that first long search yielded little expected,
Just grew heavier, more lost in transit.

Jennifer Reeser

TO THE COSMOS DAISY

Be bright clear yellow, Cosmos, when you bloom,
the tallest stalk and color to be found
within the confines of the garden ground,
a growing candle in the evening gloom.
Be elegant of stem, and when the broom
of southern breezes sweeps your leaves around
the silver curry, be you strong and sound
enough to scatter seed before your doom.
The lore and legend of my predecessors
is heaviest this day of any yet,
and you seem chiefest of the spring professors
to teach me how to pay them back my debt,
persistent in the promise of successors,
protected from all I cannot forget.

Kelly Ann Malone

DEVICES ON STAND-BY

I’ve tucked away two forty-fours.
They’re deep within a wall.
Their bullets line my dresser drawers
and wait for me to call.

Two vials filled with cyanide
are safe within their space.
I’ve stashed them in a pot outside
beneath the Queen Anne’s lace.

Two gleaming knives to slit my wrists
sit nestled in a shed.
I’ll use them if my grief persists
to soak my ivory bed.

Two slipknots made of sturdy rope
sit limp upon a chair.
It helps me when I cannot cope
to know that they are there.

You ask me why they come in two’s?
the need for added stress?
In case the first one that I choose
is launched without success.

I’ve had these items in my house
for over forty years.
I’ve hid them from my kids and spouse,
my neighbors and my peers.

I tried to do it years ago,
but then I had a boy.
And two more children in a row,
brought intermittent joy.

At last I thought my work was done,
and I could end my life.
But now my daughter has a son,
my son now has a wife.

I’ll get around to my demise
and give in to despair,
when I can look into their eyes
and tell them I don’t care.

Christopher Michel

SISTER OF MERCY

Sister Mary George O’Toole
No one’s lover, no one’s fool,
Always merciful and fair,
A tidy chignon keeps her hair
        Covered with cloth and prayer.

Knows this world is strewn with sin,
A steady gaze and level chin.
Calms the fire in her eyes,
Never one to sermonize,
        Moral conduct never lies.

Built a convent and a college
To honor both her God and knowledge.
Empires each, to discipline.
Harmonies of faith and reason,
        A secret jar to keep things in.

When the cooks have gone to bed,
With but the Lord and her own head,
Sister Mary George O’Toole,
Alone and empty in her school,
        Cries for all that’s sweet and cruel.

An iron plaque, a barren floor,
Plaster walls, a wooden door,
Across the beads her fingers trace,
While recollecting every face.
        She loves them from a distant place.

C. John Holcombe

TEXTS

The simple truth another age uncovers;
Where words are nomads sense is a citadel.
Of how they were as men, employers, lovers,
The text says naught: from it we’re not to tell
The sharp, bespectacled ascetic from
The warm and genial fraud. To them what mattered
Most—their triumphs, griefs, their shyness or aplomb—
To us now matters least. These things are scattered
In minds now written out, some half-smudged sound
Within the travesties of memory.
But for the sense—for that I now sit down,
Turn on my lamp and read most carefully.
For all its arrogance of great estate
The truth must be a penitent and wait.

Tom Riley

A THOUSAND UNCLES

A little recreation was in order.
He felt he had a duty to ignore
duty, to give necessity no quarter,
to give his conscience, inner foe, what for.
With zeal he fought that brief internal war
until he won—and made his conscience say
a thousand uncles. Thus did he restore
his primal liberty. “It’s here to stay!”
he chuckled. “And my world, once cold and gray
and full of obligation, is as bright
as my imagination. This display
is truly glorious both day and night.”
He thought that he had paid the only price.
The inner world, my lad, is not that nice.

SUMMER READING

He read Catullus as he sipped red wine.
Now and again, he had to have a look
at his small yellow lexicon. How fine
it was, his first acquaintance with that book!
If he was moved, he neither wept nor shook.
If he laughed, it was never from the gut.
Catullus was a virtuoso cook.
His verses pleased—but neither crushed nor cut.
Yet they were not all how: they held a what
far more substantial than a Vergil’s lies.
Catullus called his queenly slut a slut.
His hate was hot but not of giant size.
And with our summer reader that was fine:
you can’t drink vast, wild rivers of red wine.

THE CALCULATOR

As lofty poets formed their cloudy dreams,
he scorned the foolishness of such extremes,
and carved his words like chessmen, round and smooth,
and shaped, against himself, fantastic schemes.

Edward Wier

ARTISTIC ADVICE

Sketch your life lightly in pencil. Don't be
Too eager to make bold, confident strokes
In permanent pigments, anxious to see
The crude results your impatience provokes.

Don’t trace over lines of another mind;
But find your own image. It will appear
At first, distant, strange; but let it unwind
Across your horizon, drawing you near.

Don’t live in your shadow. Stand back and gain
Some perspective. Learn; leave for a while.
As you take shape, you won’t have to explain,
A word about meaning, purpose, or style.

Then when you arrive, no longer a child;
Grab every color and go fucking wild.

Pino Coluccio

DREAM OF A BEE

The short time it’s sunny,
our tool belts on, we plumb
the parking lot for honey
in clovers springing from
the pavement’s snaking cracks.

And dream, asleep in wax,
that once there was a flower
with floppy petals, and
she’d spend out summer’s hour
waving like a wand.

THE TIME WE WON THE CUP IN ‘82

Little guys who lug a crooked square
and campanile, and forklift debts,
deal hands and fold out butts,
Bics and joshes at haunts on St. Clair.
They down regrets and coffee swigs and clap
a buddy’s back, or grin their big mouth
around a sangwidge, here, there, both
at once and nowhere, or nowhere you can map.
But fists and flags and long honks from rusty
Buick boats. Pop tunnels drains.
And TTC’s it home at night beat.
But that day we filled the skinny street,
and next day the dailies, like all the dusty
jugs of blood that filled our skinny veins.

THE MOUSE

He kept well-walled the crumbs he’d take,
whether of bread or birthday cake.
And Cheerios were bagels to
the mouse who watched our doings through
a vent but scruffled late at night
in the glowy dim of the blue half-light
that LEDs in VCRs
(which appear, to mice, as stars
appear to humans) softly shed
on mice out for their nightly bread.
Like all who hide, he walled less well
the funky crisp small carcass smell
that carried, when the furnace coughed,
through the lonely downtown loft
where silence asked me and its friend
the dark why lives lived little end.

LINDSEY

Wooed by bigger, cooler guys,
she wasn’t about to offer me
her cuppably-curvy cheekbone-peaks,
but set about it generously,
waving hi, her sweater plush,
when she’d pass me in the hall

and sitting beside me in class. Of all
the beautiful girls I’ve met,
the only one I can’t forget
is Lindsey. Lindsey’s denim thighs,
her glasses (jutting past her cheeks),
hairclip (blue to match her eyes)

and tapered waist’s petiteness;
her cola bob, soon blush
and voice’s April sweetness—
that weren’t beauty’s bright disguise
for shoulds she’d disregarded.
Lindsey mild and lovely-hearted.

David Galef

THE SIXTIES PARTY

It’s two a.m. and all is cool for now.
The TV’s blaring in the living room.
The Late Late Show is going to tell us how
A smile a day will brighten up the gloom.
Meanwhile the kitchen crowd is taking tokes
Of pot. The back porch lovers lie about
Themselves while others grope for cruder jokes.
It’s hot. We’ve reached the end of laws to flout.
But now it’s four a.m. and all’s unwell.
The beer’s run out—no gin—the fridge is bare.
The toilet’s clogged and stinks like sludge from hell.
A naked girl screams out that life’s unfair.
If you can see what’s up, get off the floor,
But when you leave, for Christ’s sake shut the door.

Leo Yankevich

Wiley Clements, YESTERDAY OR LONG AGO, Clock & Rose Press, PO Box 342, Harwich Port, MA 02636; 96pps, $39.99, hardcover.

Contributors’ Notes

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 fifty journals and literary magazines in the United States and in Britain.

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.

Leo Yankevich’s poems have appeared in scores of small press magazines, most recently in Chronicles, Blue Unicorn, Iambs & Trochees and Romantics Quarterly. He lives with his wife and three sons in Gliwice, Poland.

Mark Allinson was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia (1947), where he has spent most of his life. Recent formal verse publications include Melic Review and Worm 26.

Michael Dobberstein teaches creative writing and other writing courses at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, IN. He has published poems in Poetry and The Literary Review.

Ernest Hilbert’s poetry has appeared in The New Republic, The Boston Review, LIT, Pleiades, McSweeney's, The American Scholar, Verse, Fence, and Slope. He is the editor of NC, an annual journal of new writing, and is on the staff of the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Jennifer Reeser is the author of two poetry collections, An Alabaster Flask, and Winterproof, forthcoming also from Word, and a Spoken Word CD. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt, The Dark Horse, The Formalist, The New Laurel Review, Louisiana Literature, and Pivot.

Kelly Ann Malone has had poems in The Wesleyan Advocate Magazine, Poems Niederngasse, Taproot Literary Magazine, and Midwifery. The mother of three boys, she lives with her husband in Canyon Country, California.

Chris Michel teaches English and attends graduate school at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. He has work forthcoming in Diner.

C. John Holcombe is the editor of Poetry Portal. His poems have appeared in Ambit, Light Quarterly, Smiths Knoll, and Candelabrum.

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.

Edward Wier’s poetry has appeared in The Formalist, Orbis, SPSM&H, Whiskey Island, The Atlanta Review, The Lyric, Troubadour, The Ledge, The Door, Windhover, Acoustic Musician and Guitar Review.

Pino Coluccio has had poems in The Danforth Review and Maisonneuve. His first collection of poems is forthcoming with the Mansfield Press in spring, 2005. He lives in Toronto, where he was born in 1973 to parents who immigrated from Buonalbergo, a town in the province of Benevento, Italy, in 1958.

David Galef has had over seventy poems published in magazines ranging from The Formalist and Light to Shenandoah and The Laurel Review. He is a professor of English and the program administrator of the M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

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