- By BEN SHATTUCK On Nantucket, eighty-year-old Connie Congdon and I sat in her dim living room looking at the 120-year-old plaster dildo that a mason had found in her chimney. It now rested in a pink dress box on her lap. At my feet, three sweet-faced Australian shepherd dogs snapped at houseflies. A catbird sang in the street. Her house…
- By MAZEN KERBAJ TO THE READER SPACE-TIME COLD SWEAT Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics artist, visual artist, and musician born in Beirut in 1975. Kerbaj has authored more than fifteen books. His work has been published in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines, and translated into more than ten languages. His paintings, drawings, videos, performances, and installations have been shown…
- By DAVID LEHMAN The drill instructor was not in a good mood. He had had a mi- graine all weekend. The weather sucked. He hated sports and there were going to be no pleasantries about the Yanks, the Mets, the Knicks, the Nets, or any other team. He knew as I knew that every- thing depended on one thing: the…
- By YANG JIAN Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI They said: “Tear off the erhu strings, Smash its body.” We ended up without music. They said: “Chop this big old tree Down to the stump.” We ended up without shade. They said: “Kill this stonemason, That carpenter, right now.” We ended up without bridges; Without pretty houses. They said: “Burn the…
- By MO FEI Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI Coins tossed in all directions, The sky pure as after an oath, You note threads of dark fate, Tassels stitched to words. The messenger comes to change dates, Already sets off from his home, The heavy leaves, parasols of trees, Overabundant, a plenty of rain. Cascading deep in their dreams Shrubs frisk…
- By TANG DANHONG Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI You might have been my brother, especially at dawn Milky vapors rise into the sky, That white adolescence wafting into my lungs. But I woo that white air, Let it grow wings of a peacock, Naïve and overwhelmed with joy. You might have been my apple, especially today, But the mashed pulp…
- By DENISE DUHAMEL Lady Gaga says she truly cares about all her Little Monsters and if you don’t believe her that is just because you don’t know her. They send her fan videos, tell her about the bullying and the beatings and she takes it all in. One night a bulimic approached me at KGB Bar. Her eyes wet, she…
- By LI YONGYI Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI Spiritual territory divided by Israel and Rome, Capitol, the eagle and the military Turned English into Latin, your ark of covenant Lurking in “Old Europe” and exceptionalism. The future of the New World, like the formed past, Stands unalterable. To glorify a Calvinist God In plantations, stock exchanges, gold valleys, You pursue…
- By JONATHAN FINK From Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad The first sign of arrival fills the air when smoke appears, dark red, like iodine poured into ethanol, a helix, thick and turning. What the burning marks is time— the seasons, warehouses of food consumed entirely as two women pause and stare.…
- By LUISA A. IGLORIA the Ladies of the Monday Afternoon Club have started a clothing drive for the Buddha, who continues his travels abroad in a world with more and more unpredictable weather, garbed in the same outfit he has worn for who knows how many centuries now: thin pantaloons and a cotton robe of ochre, to be in…
- By BRUCE BOND After Terrence Malick When the dinosaur, at the dawn of mercy, lifts his hoof from the throat of his rival whose pulse you see, whose eye tells you seas have parted into the ken of separate selves— that’s what haunts me most in the film. My friend too feels…
- By ZEINA HASHEM BECK Mama made the best Lebanese pizza: soft, thick, with olives, mushrooms, ash’awan cheese, and ketchup instead of pizza sauce. But that night there was something different about it. We knew one should never complain about home-made food, so we crunched and swallowed, washed it down with Pepsi, until she heard the glass shards under our teeth.…
- By JOHN FREEMAN My father’s father rode the rails west into Grass Valley and buried three children in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery. Cold nights he saw stars he didn’t know existed, and heard wild animals howling with a loneliness he did know. His wife was dead. Every morning he woke to the bread…
- By JONATHAN FINK The eating is like make-believe, a game of imitation—sawdust pressed between two hands becomes a pancake; soup pots steam with buttons, leather. Call your mother’s name, and she will search for food for you the same as every other parent. Hallways teem with children. Turning as if in a stream, they rise together, speak together, claim in…
- By YU NU Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI Morning air pumped off, cannabis-induced despondency Replaced him and her. Far away, his ball-playing days, His cap floating on the river, his soft tissues Like severed seaweeds. This happened in 1976. I was living alone in the garden, barely ten, frightened At night, trembling. Have you ever heard a flower Bloom? I…
- By ZHENG MIN Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI Inside my body there is a gaping mouth, A lion roaring Rushing to the end of the bridge, As the ship glides by. Looking down at the river’s rush It hears the clamor of the times Like an elephant’s trumpet in the forest, Throws a backward glance at me Into the cage…
- By MAURICE EMERSON DECAUL For Lauren Cerand In my room overlooking the Mississippi a voice tells me: in my city we bury our dead above ground a voice whispers not to lean against windows not to pry open the window I half expect to see a phantom A voice in my head has been saying the building you’re looking at…
- By MORGAN ADAMS I I take the number 25 bus from Piazza San Marco north into the hills and get off at La Pietra—a stone marking one Roman mile from Florence. Behind the imposing gate, Villa La Pietra waits at the top of the long drive lined with Tuscan cypress trees.[1]This fifteenth-century villa is the centerpiece of a fifty-seven-acre estate…
- By DAVID LEHMAN In 1988, I went into the unisex bathroom and read the graffiti. A graffito from 1980 had been erased: “Support your local philosopher. Buy a jockstrap.” In Miami, on a visit to my mother, I got to spend a little time with Isaac Bashevis Singer. He made great claims for the sexual organs. “An eye will not…
- By JONATHON KEATS Jonathon Keats has been described by The New Yorker as a “poet of ideas.” Keats’s latest project is the Millennium Camera, a custom-built pinhole camera with a one-thousand-year exposure time that will remain inside Amherst College’s Stearns Steeple until 3015. In May 2015, the college’s Mead Art Museum documented the intellectual and material creation of Keats’s camera, displaying…
- By DWYER MURPHY We took the twelve-thirty train and got into the Biarritz station just after six. There was a bus schedule nailed to the wall, but the train ride had been smooth and I didn’t want to spoil our momentum, so I waved to the first in a row of taxis and offered the driver ten euros, which…
- By GBOLAHAN ADEOLA I. Death Your father died before sunrise. On a Monday, the first in January. A morning clutched in harmattan’s tenuous grip. Haze like spectral fingers. Cold as a dog’s nose. But not wet. The grasses outside were an arid brown; it hadn’t rained for months. You’ll never forget these, the disconsolate incidentals of that morning. You’ll remember,…
- By GRANT KITTRELL I took a drive out to The Gallimaufry Goat Farm and was struck by the vast assortment of goat life in one place. Goats who’d go shock-still when startled, like a bolt through the head, fall stiff as taxidermy to the ground. Others, preferring a higher form of life, would…
- By LAWRENCE JOSEPH In that time, in that place, a few cars, a bus, on Belle Isle seen from this side of the river, dark blue icy river, on the other side of the Belle Isle Bridge Uniroyal Tire’s bright silver smoke blown over the river to Canada, time-bound, space-bound, a distinctive industrial space, Ford Motor Company Dumping Station,…
- By RON WELBURN Both a painting and a tableau I conceptualized in a feature film led to this poem, to which I connect -ed the cover photography of selected jazz albums and paintings by George Catlin. Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye (Captain David Hill) (1776) is the work of Benjamin West, an eigh- teenth-century painter born in the Pennsylvania colony.…
- By SYLVIE DURBEC Translated by DENIS HIRSON I had seven handkerchiefs Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday My mother put them away in a drawer between her own and those of my father mine were embroidered with animals for each day and week and night and the night after one colour per day Monday…
- By SYLVIE DURBEC Translated by DENIS HIRSON Go to meet redness. Reach it with all the necessary brutality. Refuse facile images. Self-portraits. Portraits of any sort. But go without reserve, crushing water underfoot, unyielding to the childlike pleasure of splashes against naked legs. Go as a painter. Roll up trouser legs, remove espadrilles and…
- By COLIN CHANNER A man-boy of nearly twenty, slave-dressing in pantaloons in 1930, slowly reads a Gleaner from behind a stocky “German” woman in a fabric shop. Finds himself in love. Walking home, feet adding shine-ness to a track cut out of scrub, he hugs the parcel of organdy that his mother took on trust, sounds each word the way…
- By JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN All of this was farmland once. When they came to build the incinerator, my father dressed like a masked outlaw. His friends carried six-foot pencils. My sister and I carried Mike Dukakis in a tank. Our mother carried us children home, and the adults had sandwiches in jail. All of…
- By DIDI JACKSON There are days I go to the mailbox and find letters from my dead husband translating for me his suicide: the cold blade softened into cursive, his fear licked onto the stamp, as the return address: the date of his death. I look forward to these letters. Some are addressed to my son, I collect and keep…
- by NICK FULLER GOOGINS Hickory and Joey Bags twitched in their lawn chairs, coming back to life. They’d been zonked on Canadian Ghost for twenty, thirty minutes, long enough that I was starting to get nervous. Nervous and impatient. We were sitting behind Hickory’s trailer with our feet in the kiddie pool. The beer was running low, and glimpses…
- By IVAN VLADISLAVIĆ Nieuwenhuizen stood on the verge, in the darkness, looking down the street. In one hand he held a brown imitation-leather portmanteau; in the other some small, cold coins given to him by a taxi-driver moments before. The tail-lights of the taxi flared up at the end of the street, and vanished. Nieuwenhuizen turned to the plot.…
- By MICHELLE ROSS Invasive species: a species that is non-native to an ecosystem and that is likely to cause harm to native species. The creature had been spotted again, and this time, accounts came from two unrelated individuals. The sightings had taken place between the hours of seven and eight that morning, both within a mile of the New…
- By AARON STEVEN MILLER In the dimness and filtered light of the school-hostel’s front hall, he read the note once more. Looking for travel companion to hitch hike to Budapest this week. Meet here Wednesday at 13:00. Milku. There he gleaned it. There it was, in this building with its waxed floor, in a band of daylight tossed from the…
- By JENNIFER ACKER At night I open all the shades so the dark comes in. This summer, I like the wide expanse of night. The full moon is high, and I see individual strands of onion grass in the shallow spot between the shores. Tomorrow we will learn that tonight’s moon is “blue,”…
- By KATHERINE DYKSTRA Bomolluck: not a thing in the night, but what you fear in the night. It can sit on your chest The train was pointed toward a hill town in Tuscany. From my seat on the exhausted maroon upholstery, I watched the bustle on the sooted platform: the hop-skip of those running late, the toe-to-toe and clutch…
- By AURELIA WILLS The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater is on a stretch of East Lake Street lined with Latino and African businesses. The South Minneapolis theater is committed to the Powderhorn Park neighborhood, to social and environmental justice, to creating community through puppet theater. Every year for a decade, I’d watched the theater’s May Day parade.…
- By TODD HEARON (And way up north they’re starting to recover in Maine the undeniable remains of a settlement you might be interested in seeing you’re into that whole hushed-up-history thing.... —postcard from Tennessee 1 You’ll pull off the main road, Route 209,…
Subscribe
Subscribe to The Common today.
Purchase this issue from The Common Webstore in print, Kindle, PDF, or e-book format.
Teach this issue in your classroom.
Contents
“The Common Statement” by Jennifer Acker
Fiction
“Unwinding” by Nick Fuller Googins
“Biarritz” by Dwyer Murphy
“from The Folly” by Ivan Vladislavić
“Key Concepts in Ecology” by Michelle Ross
“The Bone Church” by Aaron Steven Miller
“On Grief” by Gbolahan Adeola
Essays
“Siena” by Katherine Dykstra
“Puppetmaking” by Aurelia Wills
“Driving to Malaga” by Todd Hearon
“He’s-at-Home” by Ben Shattuck
Art
“Millennium Camera” by Jonathon Keats
“The Story Behind the Scenes” by Morgan Adams
“Three Poems” by Mazen Kerbaj
Poetry
“In The Dirt” by Grant Kittrell
“In That City, In Those Circles” by Lawrence Joseph
“Warriors in Art” by Rob Welburn
“I Had Seven Handkerchiefs” by Sylvie Durbec (Translated by Denis Hirson)
“from Shining Red in the Torrent” by Sylvie Durbec (Translated by Denis Hirson)
“Civil Service” by Colin Channer
“Braintree” by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
“Postmark” by Didi Jackson
“In 1988” by David Lehman
“Volunteer” by David Lehman
“Legend” by John Freeman
“Reader/Writer” by Denise Duhamel
“Because of Global Warming,” by Luisa A. Igloria
“Crescent City” by Maurice Emerson Decaul
“Pizza with Light Bulb” by Zeina Hashem Beck
“The Battle for Leningrad Begins” by Jonathan Fink
“Imitation” by Jonathan Fink
“Tree of Life” by Bruce Bond
New Poems from China
Translated by Stephen Haven and Li Yongyi
“You Might Have Been My Brother” by Tang Danhong
“1967” by Yang Jian
“Longing, a Lion” by Zheng Min
“Coins Tossed in All Directions” by Mo Fei
“The Eyewitness” by Yu Nu
“III. The USA” by Li Yongyi
