Excerpt from Trust Exercise
SUSAN CHOI
It’s been obvious from the beginning who are Broadway Babies and who aren’t. Those who truly can sing, who can give them the old razzle-dazzle, who live for that one singular sensation, have for the most part drawn attention to themselves from the first day of school.
What Matters Most
RACHEL LAVERDIERE
Where I'm headed, there will be heaps of food. After I packed my bag, I snuck past Maman pushing a tray of cinnamon buns into the oven. Yesterday, I overheard her on the phone with Mémère, “The chokecherries should be ripening soon.” Maman never lies.
Roya Zarrin: Three Persian Poems in Translation
ROYA ZARRIN
Did you hear? / They're calling me / from my northern gardens, with the scent of rice, / and from southern gardens, with the scent of revelation trees. / Forget water justice. / Don’t follow me. / Today I’m bitter, Obadiah. / Today is the feast of sacrifice ...
Poetry-Making as Empathy Play: An Interview with Oliver de la Paz
OLIVER DE LA PAZ
I had just come to terms with the realization that I had been writing about my neurodiverse kids, but through the mask of the Theseus and the Minotaur allusion. That’s when I started messing about with other shapes and structures, like mathematical equations and multiple choice questions.
A Geology of Memory: Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina
GREGORY ARIAIL
This mountain in western North Carolina, called Whiteside Mountain and Sanigilâ'gĭ in Cherokee, is a site of an ever-shifting strata of personal and historical memory. In one of my earliest childhood memories, partial and overexposed like a polaroid cutout, a king snake bakes on the brilliant white rocks of the summit.
LitFest Friday Reads: January 2020
Curated by SARAH WHELAN
The Common is gearing up for LitFest, a weekend of events to celebrate contemporary literature, with extraordinary voices such as Jesmyn Ward, Susan Choi, Laila Lalami, and Ben Rhodes. Read on for our editors' recommendations from some of the participating authors.
- KIRITI SENGUPTA My friends were aware of the wish I nurtured. If I had a daughter, / I would name her Srividya! / I was not influenced by any actor. / Our prayer room hosted a dazzling / crystal Sri Yantra on the holy altar. // My wife’s desires were girly too. She wished to drape her daughter...
- ANNA BADKHEN In the early morning, when pink Oklahoma dawn crept over the sturdy single-family bungalows and strip malls, Abu Khaled al Shimeri wrapped his left arm around the taut belly of his pregnant wife, Fatima, and had a troubled dream.
- GEOFF MARTIN I think of him now the way I saw him last: my grandfather, seated on the edge of his hospital bed with the pale shanks of his legs angled to bare feet on rubber floor… Despite the catheter tube and the IV drip at his side, he wasn’t taking this one lying down… his eyes sparkled with unspent…
- NATHAN MCCLAIN I still had a lover. Maybe let’s start there. / I hitched a ride to Boston, where I missed // the ferry by what seemed like minutes. But time / can work that way in the mind. I was in love // or wanted to be in love and there was distance / everywhere is maybe a better…
- J.J. STARR Everything swims, a stranger stands before the house. Do not bite the hand that feeds, / we say this of dogs. We slept in a cold clean room pink as rats that homestead the trees or no— / she brushed me rough. She named me / —no dogs / allowed here, but some child tantrums under the elms,…
- BEN SHATTUCK The idea to follow Henry David Thoreau’s walks came plainly while I was standing in the shower at dawn one May morning, listening to the water drill my skull and lap my ears, wondering what I could do to stop the dreams of my past girlfriend. I couldn’t find a way out...
- LESLEY WHEELER Ivy worries the dying tree. Robins / worry the grass, which is hardly grass / but an audience of violets mimicking / the sky. Mist worries the mountain, / a neckache of twisted pearls. / All the little screens are worried by light / and scripts of darkness squirming / across the light…
- LYNN PANE He had thought it was aging. He made the doctor’s appointment. It was the weakness in his hands, the way his pen slipped while trying to fill out a form—he watched these occurrences in the slow motion of panic, but it was the unstoppable laughter that frightened him, it made it hard to breathe.
- LAWDENMARC DECAMORA The shadow tall and lean, inspired by a lighthouse, squints at the Merlion. My morning behaviour skips breakfast just to tell my body to overcome the effects of the Merlion. People at the pet store are quitting their jobs only to watch the Merlion spurt water from its mouth...
- R. ZAMORA LINMARK Fake alternative facts / Fake Big Brother, bisexual bystanders, blogs, boobs, bobos, blow-jobs, Born-Agains / Fake clowns, CCTV beheadings, chlamydia and climate change hysteria / Fake democratic doppelgangers, drive-by death squads, double-dead buffets / Fake emojis, ejaculating cows...
- JESSAMYN HOPE One day, I thought, he will no longer exist. This wasn’t an uncommon thought for me, but in the middle of the night death felt less theoretical; its promise lay over my body as plainly as the blanket. That was the one problem with Good Times: the guarantee that they would end.
- GAIL MAZUR The flats mid-morning. / Fussy little house-hunting hermit crabs. // Razor clams, skate eggs, black mussels. / Sea glass frosted by the tides. // Far out, schooners, racers, sloops— Serenity of their white white sails. / Day moon, round, faint, almost transparent, / Hovering in the pale blue sky.
- COLIN CHANNER I whispered godforgiveme godforgiveme / then it came—the hiss, soft come-on / from some near but distant district, / and I prayed in precognition / of the what’s-to-come, / the chek-anticipating boff, / the crawl in dust / and coiling up to ackee bough…
- AMA CODJOE Grief is the bride of every good thing, Betty Shabazz / reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the shape of a waterfall, / which is also the shape of my mother’s dress falling // from her shoulders. Through its fabric, I can see a cloud / turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star—
- JEFFREY HARRISON I know this man, / or feel I do, / or think I could— / as though his face / effaced the centuries / between us, / his brown eyes / guileless, / frankly wise, / his gaze, though / slightly to the side, / somehow direct. / Though proud enough, / and prosperous, / to have his portrait…
- BRUCE HOLBERT Neither pretty nor homely, fat nor thin, Bernice Gardener was a middling girl, all her fenders straight but no chrome or pinstripes. With a few ounces of vinegar, some colored powders or a curling iron, she might have done well with boys. Bernice didn’t alter her pale skin and left her brown hair straight.
- VALERIE DUFF Keep that smile / barbed, the wire / the horse leans against. / Birds crack seeds / on the other side of your glass / door. The body, blind, curves / its hedge down paths. / Time’s narrow microscope. / A clump of cells, narrow threader / juking the ground, / reverberates.
- AFUA ANSONG Praise this Saturday which permits me to wash with my hands (I detest this). / Praise my dirty clothes, the ones I leave for my grandmother who starts the cycle with cold soapy water. // Praise the rinse, the rush upstairs to the open roof. There, the clouds open as I hang and hide my American jeans from…
- J.J. STARR I knew I should have told her / we’d been traveling a few hours / she hated the interstates / back routes took us through weird / towns / she liked the fields this way and up close / they come up with tassels swaying gold-beamed wind-socks / in their way / their green so bright you’d think…
- ELEANOR STANFORD All summer, I sit on the porch, my son appearing, disappearing. Walls of rain or night, of larkspur, bleeding heart. The stone floor long ago lifted from the lion’s den. / Translator’s note: Having children is a way of remaking oneself.
- LAURIE ROSENBLATT To settle while trying to say what cannot be said / precisely. As in. We were not entirely finished. / So. Love. To travel the slick road we scattered with salt. To try / to leave our sweepings under the rug. Moments // of collision, at times, our only contact. Death a near-miss.
- CHLOE MARTINEZ O keep me up, keep me going. Keep it together. Smooth me. Reduce / excess movement. There is a heaviness. There is around me a / God Structure. It helps me organize my thoughts. It has laid out / plans, I think, for various eventualities, and the existence of plans…
- NATHAN MCCLAIN How lovely, at last, to have nothing to do but sit, shirtless, in my collapsible chair, reading Gerald Stern’s American Sonnets, and lovely to sit, beer in my lap, just a little tipsy, lovely, too, to ignore beauty, or desire, or whatever...
- R. ZAMORA LINMARK Dear friend, take me to where they dragged you. / Show me the plaza flanked by homes made / of hollow blocks, plywood, rusty tin sheets— / anything to keep rain and flies out. / Point to me the CCTV that followed you / across the basketball court...
- KATHERINE HILL The first time Caleb said it, Mitch vaulted the arm of the couch and was on the telephone in an instant, faster even than he’d cut on the field. Cindy remembered when her son moved purely for the joy of movement. Not today. Today it was all about the draft. How high he would go.
- SUSAN R. TROCCOLO On that bright morning in November—the first day I saw her—Anna Lea Lelli wore the outfit that distinguished her on the streets of Rome: a long cape and beret. The beret emphasized her craggy jaw and prominent Roman nose.
- GABRIELLE LUCILLE FUENTES Simon Marshall... stands in the empty gravel yard of Donald Judd’s museum... The sun dips below the high walls of the compound, illuminating a perfect half of the courtyard. Behind Simon a wide expanse stretches, interrupted only by Donald’s outdoor dining table…
- BERNARD FERGUSON the great ramble of the roads toward the airport, the flight / up & down the flight of stairs inside the house in which / i work now, inside the city & its parks that sprawl long & point / toward the river, which points toward an ocean...
- KATHERINE VAZ The fifth child of Jorge Primavera and Deolinda Oliveira Primavera was born with a hole in his heart. The doctors said: There is nothing we can do. His father worries about his newborn boy being afraid... For breakfast, crack an egg into a glass of milk and add rock sugar.
- LUIZA FLYNN GOODLETT Snip Hansons from Teen Beat while debating / Taylor versus Zac so passionately a curl escapes / its barrette and your best friend tucks it behind / an ear before it catches on lip-gloss. Start a fight / so she’ll get picked up early, forgetting a lanyard / on the den’s yellow shag.
- DANIELLE BATALION OLA In Tagalog, they’d call this tsismis—idle talk, juicy gossip. Knowing I never learned the language, my mother would beckon me with its colloquial equivalent, a phrase that still has the power to bring me back to Hawai’i in an instant. “Come on,” she’d say... “Let’s talk story.”
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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