Excerpt from The Occasional Virgin
HANAN AL-SHAYKH
Translated by CATHERINE COBHAM. The sea had depressed Huda ever since she was a schoolgirl, bent eagerly over a drawing of a princess walking with her prince beside the sea, while their dog played with a shell. The creature in the shell had dyed the dog’s mouth purple.
Welcome to the Future
VAL WANG
Most of the other diners were Chinese; Buddhism was trendy among the well-to-do of the city. I imagined the tower block in the suburbs now housing the displaced granny this courtyard house had been seized from. . . This place had been somebody’s home.
Loss and Its Antonym
ALISON PRINE
I want to learn to write about the loves / that haven’t died—yellowed paperbacks / with broken spines, the stillness of the lake / from the fishing pier on winter mornings, / the people in this small city / I sometimes recognize on the sidewalk / a decade after our bar shut down.
Ask a Local: Elizabyth A. Hiscox, Gunnison, Colorado
ELIZABYTH A. HISCOX
Not twenty degrees, negative twenty. It happens every year and many choose to avoid or flee the area in February.
Corregidor Flames
CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS
Ironic that the only other eternal flame I’ve visited is in Hiroshima. That one an actual fire that takes a bleaker look, burning until the last nuclear bomb is disassembled. And which will outlast, I wonder, bombs or freedom?
Review: The Consequences
OLGA ZILBERBOURG
This sounds like a satire of conceptual art. And though the result, in the words of Minnie’s agent, is “a weird fucking collision between crazy personal junk and images as stale as three-day-old bread,” it also “adds up” to a work of art that meaningfully explores the artist’s vulnerability and her place in the world. The same goes for the novel.
- LINDA ASHOK While you play with your tresses,/ and suckle your diamond with trust,/ while you play with the bubbles/ in your lime-soda with that straw,/ there’s something you are trying / to place and I am missing it. / While you tow my stilettos with yours, / fleece the tissue and craft roses that you / shove in my cleavage...
- MAJIDAH AL-OUTOUM He had a habit of outing clandestine lovers who were trying to keep their romances under cover. He would sing to us in a tender, plaintive falsetto. Sometimes he did seem to be singing a real song, one that existed out in the world, swapping in new words that he’d make up.
- LIZ ARNOLD In less than five minutes I’d ordered the autopsy report and the photos—five dollars each for six police photographs. I slid a forefinger into that one-inch window and cautiously lifted the envelope away from the contents. On the first letter-size page was the edge of an image: green grass.
- HAIFA' ABUL-NADI Sifting the flour, she dreamt of him reaching for her. Her body had pores as fine as those in the sieve, which took on his scent from the first time they met. She confessed that he was white and plain like flour, in an incomprehensible way, though she felt that, with this observation, she was punishing him for…
- MARILYN SIDES I made myself look away from the Master’s ear. After I told him that my father had passed, the Master, swaying slightly right before me, looked down at his suitcase. Nothing for it except to invite the Master to stay the night; I couldn’t let him drive this late at night, propped up on the steering wheel, a…
- ARAN DONOVAN wait for me. you have perhaps/ been out there and married unsuccessfully/ to several ladies. you’ve been maybe/ like a feudal lord a little/ gluttonous with your helpings, have gulped / up overly life’s rations of love and suffering. / ah well. they are delicious.
- JANE SATTERFIELD What was so terribly frightening/ about the dark wood elephant heads/ that hung in my grandfather’s hall,/ tusks aligned, trunks slightly upturned/ at the end, as if signaling luck—? / Why was it that I could see nothing / auspicious in these ornaments passed on / from some outpost or tourist destination...
- MARTHA ROSLER From the inception of her career, Rosler has maintained her investigation into the distribution and reception of mass-produced images, using the collage format to layer disparate images—from fashion, advertising, lifestyle, politics, and war—to suggest the simultaneity and co-dependence of seemingly distinct realities.
- JOHN ALLEN TAYLOR This is the body, the eight year old body, cream skinned, cat boned, silent. / Call the body Johnny. / Bend the body—it will not break. / Bend forward, Johnny. / The skull is small as a child's skull is small, but the mouth is morning on the seventh day. / Open, Johnny. / Its tongue moves but…
- RICHARD HOFFMAN The two tall boys, brothers, both/ with wire-rimmed glasses, with wicker/ creels, fly-fishing gear, and vests/ with patches of sheepskin shearling/ dotted with troutflies, worked their way/ downstream in their rubber waders. / When they passed me where I sat / watching my red and white bobber...
- EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG She wants one person in this lovely and ridiculous city to hear how, after the highway patrol came, and a small crane was towed in to remove the coil, and the sleet turned to snow, how much harder it was for Dude to drive the Freightliner back to West Virginia than it had been for him to…
- KATE BERSON First morning in Nueva York, in los EEUU, and Néstor in the kitchen was a stone his daughter rushed around like river water. Two years past her quinceañera, thirteen years since he last saw her. Néstor had kept running all the numbers in his head the whole way up to la Frontera.
- GARY J. WHITEHEAD I’ll never know the rupture and the gush, / the crown, or the crowning, the gummy grin /of the vulva, hair for teeth, the soft orb / forced forth without volition, the pungent room, / king mushroom wrenched from its mycelium. / Or parade or pageantry or one-car / motorcade. Or skid knee or broken bone.
- MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER Darkness, my sibling,/ I have a story to tell you/ Last shabbes I was chased by the law into Bed/ Stuy streets for passing out pamphlets/ decrying America’s uncles. / (If you see my friend Noah puttering around the fountain / snarling about rebar and secret files, go easy: / he’s just nostalgic for the flood).
- FAIROOZ TAMIMI As a woman in this joyous Arab nation, breastfeeding your child is a unique experience. This is because you do not have the freedom that women have in less developed societies, where it is natural to take a breast out in public and give it to a child. Nor do you have the freedom of women in more…
- CATHERINE POND When I was with the bartender, / I didn’t see a field of yellow flowers / when I closed my eyes. / There was no superbloom / the way there’d been with you, / and my heart didn’t burst open / when he put his mouth to my mouth. / Likewise, when I gazed at the truck driver’s torso, / I…
- LAURA MAHER My friend who cannot have children prefers the term barren to infertile. Her period gone by twenty-eight, mysteriously. (We’d say “miraculously” if it was something she wanted. As miraculous as a gray wolf appearing at the Grand Canyon.)
- RAFIK MAJZOUB Rafik Majzoub is a distinguished painter and graphic artist, born 1971 in Amman, Jordan. He is a self-taught “outsider artist” who claimed an important role in the Lebanese art scene after he moved to Beirut in 1992. Majzoub’s dexterity thrives through tension, impatience and velocity.
- PHILIP BRUNST My mother still dyes her hair the same gold color it was in Cambridge, and long thin strands have fallen from her bun and touch her cheek. I have questions to ask her that I should have asked a long time ago. But it’s too late. She remembers what she wants to these days.
- ERICA DAWSON The moon, her crevices, a tree/ the sharpness of her tough skin split,/ the river’s green—refluxing bile. / Eve said, I didn’t need a man to be/ my mother. Didn’t need his rib/God’s hand,/ to be made. I was already every sea,/ the month of Sundays.
- MARLIN M. JENKINS There’s so many of us here: hood boys taught/ discipline through bowing and bare feet, through/ knowing the leg is just as much of the punch as/ the knuckle. / We learned how to smooth our / anger through repetition, to count in languages / we mispronounce...
- ALAA TAWALBEH Alaa Tawalbeh was born in Amman in 1980. He works with acrylics and inks, exploring the expressions of the human face, especially those related to stupidity. He generally refuses to exhibit his work in galleries. Tawalbeh is also a computer programmer.
- NICK MIRIELLO A father is only as good the tree house he never builds/ Which he’s promised to his children before/ they were script on checkbook, a practiced inheritance/ from his father, and his father’s/ father. / A gene born in the stars men still look up at from / time to time.
- ROSEBUD BEN-ONI & no one believes the future is horses falling/ beneath ten thousand satellites & ten thousand/ tombs & who in the new/ cities will say through/ horses of fire & phosphorous drain/ that we could make the journey alone/ a temple?
- RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA The first husband is a peddler; the second a corporal in the infantry; the third a master of Buddhist painting in the Lamaist tradition; and the fourth is myself. Though nowadays I am not without occupation—somehow or other I have ended up as a local barber of some reputation.
- JESSICA LANAY It may be cliché to say this now, but how people treat themselves can show you how they treat those closest to them, then other strangers. I often forget to water my flailing herb garden. I often force my body—muscles hard from the lactic acid produced in my anxious panics—to be pleasant to my lovers, who expect pleasantries.
- MAHMOUD AL-RIMAWI Amidst crowds of passengers from France, Morocco, and elsewhere in Africa, there is a seat for young Fatima, the only daughter of Aisha, who has been waiting for her daughter at the bus station in Marrakech for five years. But Fatima is invisible on the bus.
- NOOR NAGA The gardens dehydrated, and on the beach no fruit or fresca were sold. Knotted garbage bags waited at the ends of roads for men who never came. The mosque at prayer time was desolate. For a people whose presence inspires such unease, the absence of Bedouins was chilling.
- JAMILA AMAIREH At first, the beating of my heart drowns out all the other noises: the sounds of speeding cars on the road, of stray cats chasing each other in the night, street dogs barking at one another, the sound of fear of the dark in a new place. As these nighttime sounds become familiar, my breathing returns to its…
- MUFLEH AL-ODWAN Trembling like leaves in the wind, they clung to each other as their tears coursed harder. They gazed around them as the sky became a prison, confining them far from their unborn children. As Eve’s weeping grew wilder, a new pulse thrummed in his heart, and then the boil of questions burst open: Our children? Why are we…
- RANDOLPH THOMAS When winter set in, they came/ to see us with their baby,/ a beautiful child about a year old/ who was learning to walk/ and stepped proudly/ across our living room,/ waved her fists and hands/ and shook her straw colored hair./ They were in their late thirties
- TEOW LIM GOH Ten miles of concrete can bring you/ to different places. Your feet carry you/ across the ground, let you / into worlds unlike your own. You go places / you have never been. But what matters / is not where you have been / but what you see. What you choose / to see.
- By GHALIB HALASA Two men sat near the round threshing floor in the western fields. Each with his rifle on his lap. “What a goddamn year,” Tafish said. He had a skull-like face. Small, sunken, deep-set eyes. Emaciated cheeks with protruding cheekbones. A broad forehead with dark blue veins at the sides. Skin like an aged tortoise.
- DIANE MEHTA A sea-gap opens as surf crumbles / onto shifting sediment that pretends to be a beach / but has the bones of 13,000 years; / quartz blades and sea otter pelts, the fur-trade / driving settlements that would commence / the New World with its shipyards and apple orchards, / wheat fields newly immortal in the summer winds…
- NED BALBO No matter where you vanished, you’re vanished still./ Astonished, pointing out your childhood face,/ whatever I felt, I know I always will / remember your words: That’s me. The car was full— / Prop Model T: three boys, two girls, your mother’s trace / of a cold smile vanishing.
- ELIAS FARKOUH Although this may have been the way things happened at some point, recollecting the exact order in which things take place isn’t easy. Memory blanks are inevitable, and it’s not possible to reconstruct details in their precise sequence. Which is why I took the blow.
- SARAH ELKAMEL 1. They said that hiding in a pomegranate is a grain that opens the gates to heaven. 2. Habayet el-janna or grain of heaven. 3. Are we talking about every pomegranate // why is it hiding // what if it slips // can you tell it is who it is or do you have to wait until yawm…
- MACEO J. WHITAKER In the village, we survey the damage:/ every cedar lockbox smashed,/ every pillow coated with blood, spit, snot. / The houses have crumbled. / We discover / no envoy, no manual, no code in the clouds. / Into this scene a man—old Ozymandias, / in the flesh—staggers down the street.
- JA’FAR AL-OQUAILI From that point on, I began to feel that I was conjuring, via my notebooks, the spirits of people who weren’t around; not only those who were absent for ordinary reasons of everyday life, but also those who had disappeared, or who were no longer on this physical plane.
- RICARDO PAU-LLOSA I heard those ripened, muted swoons, although/ that was no kiss—a dagger sunk into my chest./ What use authority if it cannot impose/ a hidden will? The songbird, let her muse / the painter in his cavern, his mettle at the test, / while she flickers here for me, beyond sorrow...
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
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