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"ghosts and nostalgia" by Haley King

Alex Thomas Turissini | Aubade in Sepia

How the days swept by, looking up
                         at the ceiling fan’s painted
                         blades. Your laugh in the robin’s call
                         each morning, in water trickling
                         down my shower drain (irretrievable,
                         now, as a lost ring). To wait seemed gallant—

I thought I might be transported back
                         to some fondly mythic time, displayed
                         on a mantle. Thought I might
                         hear your motorcar in the gravel drive;
                         your footsteps, careful as the chauffeur’s
                         gloved hands. Just like that—

I snuck up on middle age. A brush against the fur
                         of a creature once fearsome, now tame.


Alex Thomas Turissini is a graduate of the MFA program at Louisiana State University, where he studied the pastoral poetics of the Southern Agrarians. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review, Atlanta Review, Bayou Magazine, and Barely South Review, and he has been a contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is a college composition instructor and an annual grower of sweet corn, pumpkins, watermelons, and other produce for himself and his neighbors. He resides in central Kentucky.

​Haley King, also known by their artist name GRVNGE LESTAT, is a Chicago based LGBTQ+ mixed media artist who primary uses illustrative methods to construct their body of work and combines that with digitally manipulating their own photography to achieve an effort to create their artistic world that houses themes of hauntingly provoking atmospheres. 

Instagram @grvnge.lestat

Tik tok @grungelestat
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© 2023 Up the Staircase Quarterly
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