Issue One

For your reading pleasure, I present to you the inaugural issue of the Daedalus Review. Fourteen works were chosen, with a wide variation of themes, voices, and even nationalities. They are presented below in an order that I thought would be appealing, but feel free to jump from poem to poem and story to story as your whim dictates.

I’d like to thank everyone who chose the Daedalus Review to read and consider their work. I was surprised and excited by the volume and quality of the submissions that I received for this first issue, and it made choosing only a few all the more difficult. The process was long and trying, but it was always enjoyable.

These poems and stories will remain available on the front page until Issue Two is released during the first or second week of October. After that, they will be located in the Archives under the category Issue One. The Archives can be reached by the link at the top of each page or by the drop-down menu at the bottom of each page.

Thank you once again to all those who submitted for the first issue of the Daedalus Review! Spread the word, and keep writing.

- Andrew

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§215 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) ·

Cubicle

By Justin Alvarez
 

     A steadfast rain dissimulates the carpeted silence of the office, the piddling sounds of breathing, the squeaks of cheap dress shoes and the creaks of rusty swivel chairs. I lean forward to dial a phone number, the shape of my back a pithy assertion of my approaching defeat. The man on the other end has a thick New York accent, and I can hear a baseball game in the background. “If you’d like, sir, I could call you back at a better time?” I ask, still optimistic for the sale. Then there’s a loud cheer and high-fives so frequent it sounds like the Fourth of July.

     “What better time than this?” he replies.

—

Justin Alvarez is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate at Goddard College. He lives in southern Maine with his girlfriend and two pets.

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§119 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · 1 comment · Tags:

Ecuador

By Jeff Klooger
 

After the paintings of Gonzalo Endara Crow

Why is it in our country trains roll across the trackless sky?
Why are the hills puce and mauve? Why do the trees
bring forth bouquets of fairy-floss pink?
Green spheres, like apples filled with helium, float upward
through the blue air. The hillsides
are dotted with square houses, and below in the valley
a town collects itself round a circle of dust.
There people gather, reaching out
to touch balloons before they ascend,
departing the world and its cares. In the street
blue maize lies gigantic like an abandoned harvest,
and the blue horse, defiant as nature,
stands its ground amid the ceremony of pilgrims.
We do not know where we go or why, but our dreams
are whole worlds. On the hilltops, enormous candles burn,
attracting moths, which in their turn attract the hungry birds.
Above each flame, birds and moths flutter like confetti,
a festival of life and death. It’s like that in our country.
Even in darkness, there is some light, some hope,
mysterious pleasures.

—

Jeff Klooger’s poetry has been published in Australian and international online and print journals. Recently his work has appeared in The Liberal, Words-Myth, Eureka Street, Full Of Crow and Text. His other interests are music and philosophy. His first book, on the ideas of the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, was published in 2009.

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§167 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Glads

By George Bishop
 

For Gladys

I watched a woman fall
apart when her husband dropped
dead at her feet. Not a soul went back
to the house after that, where gladiolas
lined the fence and one by one they stopped
coming up. Everyone remembers

how she spoke so highly of her glads,
how unaware she was now of a story
that grew around her husband, how
one by one he pulled them back
into the earth. They thought of him
collecting them in his empty skull,
thinking someday her tears
might reach him.

But she, too, dropped dead
one day descending a flight
of stairs in a different house.
And the only thing we notice
now is the dark garage
where all their tools
are locked inside.

—

George Bishop was raised on the Jersey Shore until relocating to the central Florida area in 1989. Recent work has appeared in Freshwater, The Meadow, Barnstorm and is forthcoming in The Griffin and Third Wednesday. His chapbook Love Scenes will be released by Finishing Line Press in the Fall 2009. He is also currently a poetry reviewer for the publication Sotto Voce.

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§156 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Your Septic Tank Has Exploded

By William Doreski
 

Your septic tank has exploded,
your books tumbled from their shelves.
Rather than reshelf, you’ll sell

your house and move to Rhode Island
where the big tame bay flatters
islands gone shapeless and adrift

and ruined old mill cities sigh
as the sea breeze warps from the Sound.
You claim you’ll commute from there,

but after a week of driving
a hundred miles each way you’ll close
your textbooks and retire. You lack

the will to heal the hole in the soil
where your septic tank burst in shame.
No use trying to read the books

splayed open on the floor. You shovel
your clothes into plastic bags, scoop
cosmetics, shampoo, and toothpaste

into another bag and slam
yourself into your pickup truck
and cry. Behind your house the river

apologizes with the song
of an oriole. Maybe the bank
will lend the money to replace

the septic system. Your neighbor,
a mountain of earnest goodwill,
could help sort and reshelf the books.

Rhode Island’s too small and shy
to accommodate your misery—
the bay too flat and historical,

the towns on Long Island Sound
obsessed with sand worms and tides.
And your clothes, rumpled in bags,

have wrinkled too badly to wear
among strangers. So you might as well
stay home and watch the orioles

twitter about their swinging nest,
oblivious to the stink you’ve loosed
on the innocence of the world.

—

William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge.

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§164 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Girl With Bougainvillea

By Christopher Woods
 

     She passes now, at seven in the evening. Down there, below. She does not seem to notice the bougainvillea, or the lone mango tree. She does not see the way the sun hangs heavy on the wall, the other side of the courtyard. She passes this way every evening, a reed thin bird, looking for a place to light.

     This is as close as I’ll come, I say. As close as I’ll get to her. Having her.

     Here, removed from her, I see only her. I smell the flowers and the fruit. Pleasant smells that I now associate with her.

     Many here make that mistake, of confusing their senses. So they call to her. Summon her. They pay a guard, who pays another. Who pays the guard who patrols the courtyard. Then, in this way, in slow minutes, the girl arrives in a man’s cell.

     And it is also in this way that she sails through the dark nights, lighting with strangers who are famished for the touch of a passing bird. She lands for awhile in a small concrete shell, to give away most things. It is dawn before she leaves.

     I am awake, always. I do not sleep well. I watch for her, down below, passing so very quietly.

     She is tired and frail. And used, of course. Maybe used up entirely. Somewhere in the cell block a man is sleeping it off. Dreaming her over and over again. Maybe, in a week or two, he will have her again.

     Or, more likely, another man will have her sooner, in a nearby cell. Another brick wall away. But the walls here are fond of talking. Telling secrets. Listening. Repeating whatever comes their way. Their memory is as deep as a well. So a man will sleep with her anyway, will have her just the same. Through a wall. Inside a whisper. For a night, wherever it lasts.

     I’ve come close to having her. I’ve had bills clenched tight in my fist, a call to the closest guard rising in a dry throat. Until now, I have kept from it. It is not that I do not want her, even if a hundred men have had her. Or the fact of her children, who sleep at the prison gate, waiting for her to return at dawn.

     No, if I call to her, if I pay a fistful of pesos, I know I will lose something. Maybe more than I would gain. If she lights here, one night or many, she will never be the same again. To me.

     Nothing will be the same again. The way she passes down below. Through the flowers and the fruit. The perfection of that simple vision. Just as it is.

     So I leave things as they are. The mango tree, the red sun, the bougainvillea filling the air. I wait to see her pass. Coming and going. Dusk and dawn. I do not hope that things will change. I sleep poorly, keeping track of her. I keep an ear to the wall.

     If I listen long enough, I hear a bird, fluttering, trapped inside the night.

—

Christopher Woods has published a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. He lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. His photographs can be seen in his online gallery Moonbird Hill.

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§146 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Bugger-off

By Paul Piatkowski
 

Mum draws the blackout curtains—
don’t want to attract doddlebugs
when we sit down for dinner.
They come out and sting
on nights like this. I wish
our dinner had more flavor, more spice.

Sissy was still groaning from gin,
when the long whine whistled the air,
flocking us simple pigeons
to the Anderson shelter outside,
our metal haven, the beds divided
the room into bread loaves.

Once my ears work again,
we go out.
The house in one piece still:
I’ll have to dust the debris
before we have tea tomorrow.
My parents are planning on company.

One bomb landed close to home,
I tell Baxter’s soft ears,
his head all a pile in the front yard.
It punctured a lorry next door,
ripped into it like a ham. I do miss meat,
the rations leave one ever so empty.

Not sissy, though—she is heavy,
from her boy-o, Matt Hervishire.
Spotted them in Miss Helshank’s bed,
about where they found the old bird herself.
That’s how it is everyday: eggs
for breakfast, and a blitz for dinner.

—

Paul Piatkowski lives in Winston-Salem, NC with his wife and corgi. He teaches high school English. He has had poetry published in U.S. 1 Worksheets and The 2River View.

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§171 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · 1 comment · Tags:

Fly on the Wall

By Ilan Herman
 

     I first noticed the fly on the wall three days ago, while dining at Ming’s, a Chinese restaurant I frequent daily. I smiled at the fly, whom I’d decided to name Ernie, and proceeded with breakfast. Ernie watched quietly, motionless, but I sensed that he craved my eggs and potatoes and, more so, my buttered toast.

—

     When I arrived for lunch the next afternoon, I happily noticed Ernie still comfortably perched on the wall. A doubting spectator would insist it was my fertile imagination, but I saw Ernie wink at me. I winked back and sat at my favorite spot, by the window, seat B at table D, as defined by the seating chart Mister Ming had been kind enough to show me. He did so only once, and declined my request to copy it. His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “Chart secret,” he whispered, bony fingers clutching the page as if it held the secret formula to the crunchiness of Kentucky Fried Chicken. My hungry eyes followed his trembling hands as he reverently slid the laminated sheet of paper into its brown folder. (more…)

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§193 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · 1 comment · Tags:

Painters’ Exhalations 470

By Felino A. Soriano
 

—after Paule Vézelay’s Two Forms Holding Two Ovals

Moon forms a wicker basket’s
rough-edged silhouette, planted
on branch arm’s dedicated clutch,
       hiding in its muscular hold
dust lying on its lamenting side,
       physically rising from its kicked persuasion and
ground’s unwelcoming vernacular. Posted,
gracious creatures of night’s interim hours, pivoting
heads magnify alert transgressions the hunted
expire before rusted postulation. As night’s
wrists
       begin to bend into near-broken
examples of constant exertion,
two owls abscond, freely
stating day’s heavy influence
dictates a tiredness unseen for the reason of
allegorical weakness.

—

Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults, and editor/publisher of Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. He has authored 10 collections of poetry. His website explains further: www.felinosoriano.com.

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§174 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

The Last Story

By Janann Dawkins
 

Too many mistakes, too many times
Indirection left unanswered. What news
May have entered the grid, what scintillating

Rumors shaped the way we
Understand the world? Too late
Songbirds tell us to play on instinct.
Such a romantic view of the universe,
Ever the power of citizenry to go, turn out
Rot that gummed the machinery.
Tempered, words turn to matter.

—

Janann Dawkins’ work has been featured or is upcoming in Literary House Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, LiteraryMary, Poesia, At-Large, Alba, Taj Mahal Review, MiPOesias, Existere, Anastomoo, and The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others. Her chapbook, Micropleasure, was published by Leadfoot Press in 2008. She resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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§160 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Factuality

By Richard F. Yates
 

In poetry
I can lie like a sonnuvabitch
and get away with it

Because the truth of a poem
isn’t related
to its historical factuality

It’s in the fingers of the wind
wrinkles on memories
and promises of pleasures
in the dark

—

Richard F. Yates is a poet, short story author, and artist living in Washington state, USA. He is married and has two daughters, works in the writing center at Washington State University @ Vancouver, and his work has appeared in such places as: Mad Swirl, The Salmon Creek Journal, Words-Myth, Word Riot, and Vision? Nary! Magazine.

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§190 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Maya

By Billy O’Callaghan
 

     If there is one thing I have learned over these past few weeks, it is that there is no substance to time. None. One minute I am thirty four years old, doing all the things that people of my age do, all the things that we can get away with, and then the next I’m fourteen again, huddled beneath the sheets and wishing that the whole world really was nothing more than a fetid dream. To the vast majority of us, time travel seems utterly ridiculous until we actually experience its turmoil. My wife says that everyone has their own particular way of dealing with grief.

     We’re born, we live, we die. Those are the facts, and good or bad doesn’t enter the equation. People have been challenging this born/die theory forever, for millions upon millions of years, and the cycle has yet to be beaten. Knowing that, though, doesn’t stop us from trying. Ally was born, lived, died, and I would have confidently bet all the money in all the banks that if it were at all possible to trick the game then she’d have been the one to find the way. For six years she ruled Martha and I, always, it seems now, with a smile, always happy, but always in control. Six years, a span of time that felt enormous and eternal during its passing but which feels trifling in its brevity now that it has spun itself out. I’ve begun to think of time as an actual clock, and whenever I consider it now I tend to focus on its internal workings, the carefully weighted springs, the gently greased cogs, everything working in minute perfection with everything else but everything an accident waiting to happen, too. When you think about it, and I mean really think, there is just so much that can go wrong. All it takes is any single one of those tiny workings to crack, to split apart, to come up with even a vaguely acceptable reason for malfunction, and that is it, as fast as a finger-snap the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. One small break, and all of time stops. (more…)

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§208 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Note From August

By Carolyn Srygley-Moore
 

I think this is an evening when I should be studying
the anatomy & the dignity of trees, even as they stand alone, in shadow

or in light, as if waiting – or not waiting – for a train,
their sequins glittering. Yes, I need to study the trees, tonight…
Right now; right here.

I tell you this, you say
“you need to start painting again, surround yourself with oils

& turpentine.” But the dirty dishes, I say, the stucco walls
covered with crayon cobwebs that need paint, & yes, the nude

model I lack: especially the walls between myself
& the color red, myself & brushstroke, myself & the abyss

of images from my past & present & future
lapsings of time. But clench a rose between your teeth, I will begin.

I will find, as I keep finding things I thought
lost, as one stumbles upon the truth through error, if one

believes there is a truth; stumbling, I am, through ridged
mountains of old laundry, discarded drafts of poems, drafts

of loves lost & found & lost again, light glancing off skins
of pears hung in the riverside grove – hey, is that you
there, again, eyes like heads of nails?

—

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§182 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Anything Seen From a Distance is Instantly Picturesque, or, The Music Box

By Kristina Marie Darling
 

     Once the last aria fades, a young man leans against the railing of the theatre’s grand entrance, singing fragments of Orpheus and Eurydice. He closes his eyes and the grief in each pale blue note begins to unsettle me. Alone on the sidewalk, I watch the boulevard darken. Knowing that one can’t chart the strange geographies within another, or navigate the unlit paths beneath their heart’s sleek surface. And the man still singing as the air grows cold. As days pass. His voice becomes the music tucked inside a glistening box, wound and released by memory. Every time the moon rises, its little golden key won’t stop turning.

—

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s degree in American Culture Studies. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Miller’s Pond, Illya’s Honey, Big City Lit, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies.

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§141 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

Andalusia

By Christian Ward
 

This is the kind of country
that fogs windows with mirage,

making you see circuses rising
out of dust left on shelves,

horses sleepwalking out of corrals.
Heat won’t turn your skin

the colour of paprika, set
your throat alight, but will convert

you to its cause: To worship fire
and praise its ability to destroy

and create at the same time. Not long
after the forests and fields

have been razed, seeds will rise,
their first leaves cupped; as if in prayer.

—

Christian Ward is a London-based poet, whose work has appeared in journals such as Welter, The Emerson Review and Diagram. A chapbook, Slippage, was released last year from Liverpool-based Erbacce Press.

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§186 · September 8, 2009 · Issue 01 · (No comments) · Tags:

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