A NEW PAGE
I’ve always been a morning person, drawn to the freshness of those early hours more than the lamplit solitude inhabited by night owls. I love the blue quality of the light before everyone has woken up, and then the way the sun spills over the mountains, slowly spreading across the windows like butter over toast. In terms of light effects, sunset has a similar magic, but my mind is so cluttered with work and other worries from the day.
Dawn, however, feels like an open field of possibility, a new page. Accompanied by gentle stirrings of color, a chorus of birdsong, maybe steam rising from a mug of tea, dawn eases me into the present. It marks a threshold and invites me to linger there a moment before passing through.
As many of these published pieces describe, that threshold can take on many different colors, textures, and sounds depending on the place or time of year. I remember the calm suburban dawn, waking first at a sleepover or practicing my violin before school. And I remember the clamoring city dawn, leaving a hotel in Manhattan or running for the metro in Madrid.
Sometimes the dawn is symbolic, the beginning of some venture or a green emotion pushing up through the soil of our bodies. An insight dawns on us, and we see things with clearer eyes, a brighter view. And sometimes the dawn is still to come—we find ourselves in the darkest time just before, as the common saying goes. Dawn as a kind of hope or horizon, the reassuring promise of a sunrise, the end of whatever night we’ve endured.
For many, this is a difficult time. We hope this issue of Halfway Down the Stairs offers some solace, amusement, beauty, perspective, and empathy—a little light on your window.
The theme for our next issue is “Resilience,” and we’re open for submissions now through May 1, 2026. Thank you, as always, for trusting us with your work.
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Phillip Watts Brown is a poetry editor at Halfway Down the Stairs.
© 2026, Phillip Watts Brown
Halfway Down the Stairs 