Image: In From Out by Parsa Malihipour (fka Glossy Pupils) (from Issue 63.2, Spring 2025).
Hello dear reader!
Happy solstice to you and yours <3 As we wait for the days to slowly grow longer, I’d like to offer a poem from our 63.2 Issue (Spring 2025) which has stayed with me. I often return to Stefanie Lee’s “STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN KNOWS WHERE” when I need company, when I need a reminder that desire weighs on others as it does on me. May it offer you a glimmer of solace through the winter nights.
With warmth & solidarity,
Ayda Niknami, Poetry Editor
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN KNOWS WHERE by Stefanie Lee
if you have never pressed your kneecaps into fate—thrust yourself
into life as a spark careening toward dry brush—why are you waiting?
to climb that stairway, on your knees, to heaven knows where.
to shove through the cracks of your own breaking, like a vine.
do you know what it means to want like a rain-drenched dog? pawing
through dirt for something worthy of being begged for without shame?
legend has it: only three distinct entities ask for love outright.
whining child before bed, hungry customer in a restaurant, &
that dog, again, damp-nosed yet sinless. women, as angels, never get
so desperate, so famished—therein lies the fairytale. you cannot fold
your desire into a tidy, digestible packet—what is as brutal &
mesmerizing as need’s slow crawl along the body’s skeleton?
& at the end of it all, stripped of masks, seen for who you are—freed
from applause, no lights, just limitless sky & the quiet hum of things
you can no longer avoid. this is how it ends: creature of your
heart still walking on its knees, ascending toward new peace.