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    From the Editors

    Ars Poetica, or What I’m Doing Here

    Say your madras shorts are dirty and I hate those shorts
    I could write
    Love is why I refuse to do the laundry
    or
    If you love me, you should wear chinos.
    It’s painting to avoid a conversation.
    Like when you tell me the milk is sour, and then put it back
    In the fridge, I might write an ode to [...]

    About Leland Quarterly

    Leland Quarterly: A Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.Our mission is to tap into the almost incomparably diverse talents of Stanford’s undergraduate student body, soliciting a wide array of poetry and prose, and working closely with authors to achieve a publication of superior content and design. Leland’s statement – from fiction to poetry, essays to reviews – will be enduring, common, recognizable, and extraordinary.

Featured Articles

For Me

I’m afraid the guy who cuts My hair someday will snap, talk Baseball, slide the razor down my face, pull My locks as we discuss the demise of the LA Times And use the ...

Sanctify

We didn’t believe when we first heard, because you know how church folks can gossip. Like the time the elders were convinced Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a ...

featuredimage Dry Creek Valley

My parents announced their divorce the same summer the vines contracted Phylloxera, a root louse, and began to shed their rich green leaves, revealing the sea of gnarled brown stumps ...

featuredimage The Fool and the Schoolmaster Weep with Rapture

The cannon bewitches the body…the school compels the soul.” -Ambiguous Adventure Some ten years ago, while my mother and I lived in Dakar, Senegal in an overlarge white concrete building between the ...

Creative Non-Fiction

Meals for Three

Watch, little child
She stands on a step-stool in a sunlit kitchen in Damascus, watching her grandmother’s pale hands fashion food for a family of ten. Although her grandmother tries to shoo her away, the bird-like six-year-old perches at the old woman’s side everyday, straining her small neck to catch every motion. She learns how [...]

Criticism

Infinite Zest: Thoughts on Gogol

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe;
I was not offended.
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
George Clinton, “Maggot Brain,” 1971
It’s hard to say whether this kind of thing—making a case for [...]

Online Exclusive

This cup of coffee

White Styrofoam armies march out onto every street and come together in neat columns, cupping brown heat, melting through the slush of the city. Fragrant coils of energy seep through the veins of the machines. Puffs of warmth. Steam tunnels breathe in silence under the city. Shadowed skies above swirl the surface in dark ripples. [...]