Jonathan Endurance
we are / split sentences finding meanings to each / letter of our lives. — Jonathan Endurance, from “Celebrating Love in the Time of Drowning,” Up the Stairs Quarterly (no. 47, 2019)
Category: Quarterly
Mahmoud Darwish
As for me, I will enter the mulberry treeswhere the silk worm makes me into a silk thread,then I’ll enter a woman’s needle inone of the myths,then I’ll fly like a shawl with the wind … — Mahmoud Darwish, from “Not as a Foreign Tourist Does,” translated by Fady Joudah, Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 2005)
Timmy Chong
and from a thousand milesof soft memories andbad haikus away Ilet you pull me in,all warm and dry likea towel at the beach, whichwe lifted like that postcard From the Shade Garden—You are still everywhere,I wish you were here — Timmy Chong, from “I Know There’s Still a War Outside,” Up the Staircase Quarterly (no.… Continue reading Timmy Chong
Samuel Ugbechie
Like the measure of you I have now. Little. Sprinkled. The flicker of light dimminginto the night. — Samuel Ugbechie, from “Made Distance,” Up the Staircase Quarterly (no. 55, 2021)
Carter Mathes
‘To dream is to know,’ I remember my grandfather telling me on more than one occasion. I realize that this phrase must have meant many things to him, not all of which I’ll ever know. But I do feel the vibration of these words of his in reminding me always that when your existence is… Continue reading Carter Mathes
Amy Lowell
O You, Who came upon me once Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing, Why did you not strangle me before speaking Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words And then leave me to the mercy Of the forest bees. — Amy Lowell, “Carrefour,” Originally published in Coterie: A Quarterly: Art,… Continue reading Amy Lowell
Jenny Browne
Nothing I have known ever seemed real until I touched you with it. — Jenny Browne, from “Luck,” Oxford American (Fall 2017)
Richard Jackson
Alternate Endings There are times when they gather at the edge of your life, Shadows slipping over the far hills, daffodils blooming too early, the dark matter of the universe that threads its way through the few thousand blackbirds that have invaded the trees out back. Every ending sloughs off our dreams like snakeskin. This… Continue reading Richard Jackson
Emily Kendal Frey
Gulf of Sorrows If we were a black velvet painting I’d come out of the frame and hit the arc of your pain a bat in the rafters There, now we can rest Emily Kendal Frey, Sixth Finch. Summer 2013.
Michael Bazzett
I Want to Tell You About a Woman She used to put her thoughts on simmer and let them cook down to gravy. Her eyes were dark, with a crescent-shaped scar under the left, like a lost parenthesis or a boat slipped from its mooring. The scar disappeared when she smiled. This strikes me… Continue reading Michael Bazzett
The Vale of Soul-Making 