Dark Vader
ANNELL LÓPEZ
Last year, when she joined the dojo on Niagara Street, an older kid referred to her as Blackie Chan. Our mother refused to explain to her what it meant and instead allowed Junie to believe Blackie Chan was not only real, but so strong he could karate-chop cinder blocks in half.
Lightning Talk on I-90
ALI SHAPIRO
I was somewhere outside Rome when I saw the grief truck. Seriously? I said aloud, incredulous, to no one. Incredulous, and a little giddy: I couldn’t help but be delighted by signs, even bad ones; I wanted, more than any particular message, evidence of any message at all.
Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive
MARÍA NEGRONI
No—posthumous—inquiry will manage—never—to see what I wrote. What I lost each time—to / discover what a home is: stiff body inside the openness it has created. No one will know how / much I insisted, how much I demanded—and with no defenses.
Writing into Negative Space (Absence): Tiana Nobile interviews Sarah Audsley
SARAH AUDSLEY
My intention is not for erasure, but for the variable X to stand in (or take up space) for all the unknowns, for what is undefinable, for the unsolvable. I wanted the book to have an “us” and a “we,” not just an “I.” Lately, I have been thinking about how healing—which I think is every day and on a continuum—happens in the collective.
Through the Lens of the Littoral: A Review of Ralph Sneeden’s The Legible Element
Review by MATT W. MILLER
Sneeden, whether talking waves or poetry, is never pedantic, never flexing knowledge about water or literature. He’s just excited to make connections between ideas, fully and puckishly aware of his geeky literariness, acknowledging that “Nothing, I am told, is more boring than when I do start talking about the waves.”
- VIRGINIA KONCHAN This is a torn map of the forsaken world. / There are lines even wolves cannot cross. / Every voice an epitaph, then a little tune / from the neighbor’s garden apartment / suggesting a rondo, or circle of fifths. / Plato said the soul is a perfect circle. / Perfection: from the Latin perfectus...
- AIDEE GUZMAN Cowboys aren’t remnants of the Wild West. Today they herd cattle across state lines, national borders, and now even oceans. From the feedlot to the slaughterhouse and from pasture to greener pasture, a cowboy’s travels feed the food industry machine.
- VIRGINIA KONCHAN I cannot remember a time when I was not chosen last. / That and the great, timeless subjects: music, weather, war. / Wounds are openings through which presence shines through. / The child in the doll, Christ in the wafer, the ocean in a droplet. / The photos of beloveds I store in a keepsake box, under the…
- SAM SPRATFORD The excess of the archives—all thirty-two crates—is an artifact of Applefield’s inexhaustible excitement for the pieces and writers he worked with as the editor of Frank, which began publishing in 1983 and ceased in 2003. Applefield saved manuscripts...
- JULIÁN DAVID BAÑUELOS I noticed the canas sprouting from her scalp, I noticed the sky, / I noticed the engines hum, I noticed my heartbeat, and the breeze. / Nunca fui a Iowa. // My mother tells me I gave her canas, and now I have my own.
- HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES Sunday had arrived—Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord thy God—and brought with it a strong exhale that breezed over various labor camp sites of the San Joaquin Valley.
- DAVID LEHMAN The month, shortest of the year, least popular, ends, / and on the radio there’s “Midnight Sun,” a concept / worthy of a Ramos Gin Fizz, if you have the ingredients, / it being understood that the weight of the world is too / hefty for any one consciousness...
- JOSÉ ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ The wish is always that we’d walk in, / Give each other bear hugs, / Tight and unencumbered, / Nothing of my body shameful, / That he’d cradle my face in his palms / And smile wide, in awe of who I’ve become...
- JULIO PUENTE GARCÌA Jacinta’s favorite was El Tata. I close my eyes and see Jacinta with faded cowboy pants that had to be folded many times above her boots, a wide mustache in the style of Zapata assembled with dried leaves, and a belt improved with red watering hose.
- JENNIFER FRANKLIN How long did I stand there in his classroom, his desk / behind the bookcases, hovering right there at the end of childhood? // How long was I frozen—my year-long adoration of him / evaporating...
- OSWALDO VARGAS When you’re not packing cherries, you pass out crowns of Crossandra flowers / to every coworker who’s crossed a border. / You think of your father, when he said no to you moving to the city to study chemistry. / So you went north, to study fruit instead.
- GABRIELA SPEARS-RICO I’ve always written my poems / on borrowed paper and borrowed time / In the camps, as a child, journaling / by the fire, by whatever light I could find. // What do you want for your birthday? / My mother asked, knowing she didn’t have a dime.
- GABRIELA YBARRA LEMMONS our truck gathers speed as we approach the hills of el valle and for / a few seconds i am in flight we accelerate embark the horizon’s / next hill we brake drive past algodón pull to the side of the / road
- NED BALBO Because I still remember my mother’s scar, / six inches long, an inch wide, sunken gash / below her waist, forever unexplained. / Because the scar looked rushed, a knife’s quick work / closed with no time to lose.
- ELLYN GADOS I am surrounded by good intentions. On the wall of the post office there is a note that says, I am an honest girl, written by a customer who took a card costing $2.99 and left $3. The town maintains a free rack of clothing at the dollar store...
- R. ZAMORA LINMARK No I do not want everlasting life / to be condemned to forever here / on this wasted earth no merci messieurs / unlike the Struldbruggs hailed all the way / from the / island-nation of Luggnagg / discovered at the end of Book Three...
- AIDEED MEDINA My mother / works on the machines in the lettuce fields / wrapping the heads in thin printed plastic / covered in bright letters meant to draw customers’ eyes. / She is proud of the smooth, seamless wrap.
- AIDEED MEDINA There is no time to complain,/ only time to move as fast as you can/ through the rows of low-lying shrubs,/ the tall stalks. / The people of the fields leave / the complaining to the rest of us, / driving by on our way to work, / school, / the gym.
- ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE Chrome glinted / sunrise, bumpers, rear views. / Backside of cars parked full of sleep / just an hour past. / Now, everyone’s shaken loose, / switched clothes if they could. / Rows begging to be peopled...
- Catherine Staples I set the children’s beds by the windows/so light might brush their shoulders /and cheeks—so the moon might go/with them, our moon//old moon. The one they were born /under—not the fierce red twins /of days to come, swinging their/wild elliptics.
- AMAR MITRA Ask Kartik how Hrithik Roshan, the film star, sings, how he walks, and Kartik, the neighbourhood tailor, will show you how he sings and how he walks. Ask him to show you how superstar Shah Rukh Khan proposes to matinee queen Kajol...
- JONATHAN MOODY don’t feel ashamed after your lover has suggested / other ways to be intimate: like learning how to speak Urdu so that on sleepless nights / you can recite Ghalib’s ghazals to her while holding hands near the mango tree
- VIRGINIA KONCHAN If the heart is a temple, / each statue will be broken. / But I have practiced idolatry: / loved the creature more than / the creator, whom I can’t see. / There’s a hole where the sun / should be. It has entered me, / along with the cloud and river.
- MARC VINCENZ For your ears, in your exile, in your comfort zone, in which you fly unscathed, unsheathed, into the scarlet reveries, in your scarf and hands where the hum of time seems like a downpour, or the dizzying heights of mountain crags, the sharp flashes of light...
- JULIÁN DAVID BAÑUELOS There’s no choosing between privilege and work ethic. / Panhandle-colored skin. When I grow / Old you’ll see rows of cotton run above / My arched brows. My hands will return / To adolescence. But my body will speak— / Through aches and pains...
- OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK I remember the poet who wrote / of a missile / entering his home // For him in Donbas / all the newness of war is over / and yet // Vasya the cat in his lap / licks his face / just like it used to...
- OSWALDO VARGAS Neither of us see or hear the kittens / when we set the garbage pile at the farm on fire. // We come back to spines and white smoke— / that means a new Pope is coming— / but the mother cat is in his lap...
- JOSHUA BURTON I’ve been negotiating my fears with speaking. / After a life of being half-heard; / after half a life of being unheard, I now think of the chaos // I avoided in this abstinence. In some stories Jesus / is not the fool, keeping himself / to himself, knowing only God knows.
- ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE Not the circus of constellations / rifled with shooting stars / from nights we slept by the river. / Single star / soft predawn flare / signals start here / on the road between green and green / where we’ll tussle with hour by hour...
- LUPE MENDEZ Esas tierras del rincón, / I look at them como un buey pando, / feeling the dry earth, crunch under / my boots. / Es Julio, y si sigue asi, / dirán que es sequía. I pray it is not. // For now, I will do / what we have always done. I will work / like my…
- ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE Lifting Visqueen veils spread over little darlings, / selecting seedlings to set each predawn rise. / We coffeed up, chewed rumors, shared ourselves / wherever needed without a hint of roundworm / belly, malathion burn...
- JONATHAN MOODY Like a booster detached from a shuttle, my body/ Ended up in an ocean while fog enshrouded my mind. / Xanax never made me feel that unsteady; it just didn’t / Agree with Lamictal.
- LIZBETH LUEVANO in the coachella valley / children go to school and learn how to internalize silence / girls sit pretty with pigtails wrapped in bubble-ball hair ties / learn how to cast their eyes downward
- GABRIELA YBARRA LEMMONS sugarcane fields whisper to those who reach el otro lado / descansa aquí amongst víboras y machetes / descansa aquí abajo de luna conjurada / dawn the harvest begins...
- MARIA TERRONE On 88th, the street where I lived as a girl when an hour could seem an eternity, it would be years before I met the young man who pointed out that those numbers, turned on their sides, had a special meaning.
- MIGUEL M. MORALES I grew up in a farmworking family. / No, that’s not accurate—it’s incomplete. / I grew up in a family of farmworking women. / The hands of our sisters, tías, cousins, mothers...
- AMANDA MEI KIM “Lift it up,” she said. “Show me.” It was already half full, too heavy to lift. “Come over here, I want to take your picture. Hop over those plants.” I turned away. I was not tall enough to “hop over,” or foolish enough to harm a pea leaf or tendril for a photo.
- KERRY JAMES EVANS The neighbors are getting lawn chairs, / staring up, waving, praying—dogs / barking, Mary’s catching the spirit, / yelling at the dogs in tongues / to get them all to Shut up!
- LAWRENCE JOSEPH the killing, O they jubilate at it, the tsar, / a miter, a cross attached to it, on top of his head, / his announcement in the Cathedral of The Holy / Armed Forces he will cleanse the world / of a diabolic infection, ten arms of five fat / dead rats are his fingers,
- JULIA LISELLA The coyote ambles down the middle of Chester Street / and I mistake it for its domestic cousins / but it’s stouter, a strange gray white, / directionless, undecided. My dog may know / it’s not a dog because he stares blankly back at it.
Using The Common in my first-year seminars has been fun, fruitful, and helpfully startling for these classes.”
—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »
