Essays about a friendship in Senegal and an injury that won’t heal; stories set in Turkey and India, and in a laboratory, a racetrack, a gym, and a farm; and poems on family, race, faith, Ukraine, and more by Fatimah Asghar, Olena Jennings, Ezza Ahemed, Lauren Delapenha, Aleksandar Hemon, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and more.
- By J. J. STARR in faith i pray for you… i wasn’t aware of you i think of you free a song a night you… pieces, i can share just some with you… i am not a victim all my struggles might one day envelope you a noise a name physical …
- By RO SKELTON The first apartment that I lived in in Dakar was brand new and backed onto the far end of the airport runway, so that from my bedroom window I had a distant view of the ocean and of a vast baobab tree silhouetted against the hazy Saharan sky. The neighborhood––modest two-story family homes and the occasional new…
- By LIZ DEWOLF The buzzer rattles the empty room. Nearly empty—there’s the bed behind the wooden screen, the couch where Laurel sits in her underwear. Since Arda’s text that afternoon, she’s waited restlessly for him to arrive, imagining his route from where she lived with him on the Asian side of Istanbul to her new apartment on the European side: the…
- By OLENA JENNINGS Empty streets, even our taxi is missing, but the train station is crowded. I comb my hair, looking at the reflection in the ticket window. I look out at the morning. The morning isn’t working. Light in the station replaces the sun. We walk along the platform. Inside the car, we look at my reflection in the window. We…
- By DANIEL TOBIN Like a dog truant among the tended plots it turns back toward us a considerate eye as though sensing the disquiet of our being lost here among all the unfamiliar graves that would be landmarks proving the right way if this were the way we’d believed it to be. It’s not. But the animal roving its own…
- By L. S. KLATT I leave the house unlocked & walk to the garage jacked to The White Stripes. My mouth is a guitar; snow is in the sound hole. Spring. I think it’s spring. The automatic door leaps in its tracks & is music again. I record on my phone a soundwave as the GTO convertible wheels out of…
- By RUSSELL BRAKEFIELD Reggie pulled his truck up the driveway and past the old goat pasture, a field of knee-high brome that now fed only a rusted tractor, not a buck or a nanny in sight. The only good thing about his wife’s death all those years ago—he could finally let go of the shaggy herd she had loved so…
- By NINA FULLER Nina Fuller is a Maine-based photographer, writer, counselor, and sheep farmer whose career spans more than five decades. Known for her evocative images of animals, landscapes, and rural life, Nina creates much of her work from her farm and carriage-house studio in Hollis, Maine. Her fine art photography often captures moments of stillness and natural light within…
- By RACHEL HADAS The old woman with the art paces through her silent rooms, sunlight reflecting off the frames. Adult children live downstairs in the basement. Whose is the art? Is it the world’s or hers or theirs? Sunlight moves across the wall. Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, Marisol prints, flat and deadpan, do not say how to live from day to day. Four…
- By SINDYA BHANOO Dead Man’s Association meets every Wednesday evening at Padiyappa’s Tea Stall & Smoke Shop. I am the president and the primary focus of the club. There is only one table at Padiyappa’s, but at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, no local would dare take my spot. It’s been this way for the past fifteen years. The tea stall…
- By EZZA AMHED Because I didn’t say Mashallah when she swapped her nose stud for a hoop and two days later I’m met by the bursting bulb of blood and pus which seals the fibrous innards of her nose cartilage on the outside sits the bulb pulsing expanding as if it’s breathing looks like a red evil eye ornament white…
- By EMILY NEMENS She was running along the Manhattan side of the East River—this was in the bucolic “before” times, prior to when the city tore up the East Village’s riverside park, chucking its eighty-year-old trees and modernist amphitheater and ebullient perennial flower beds in the name of future flood mitigation—when she felt a curtain being snapped up the back…
- By EZZA AHMED Ten days behind my tongue summer in the diasporic, riding thick in the smell of [God] and fresh cloves. By [God] I mean the monsoon season where water appeared in snake-like streams erasing all traces of my present tense. I guess I didn’t mind, because the ground would wet into a fresh mirror which really meant that…
- By AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL I do my finest listening in the dark. My best friend has always been ink and she lets me talk so much at night. One of the marvels of my life— an alphabet. A whole green and mossy world can be made and remade from just twenty-six dark curlicues. Here’s more dark: sometimes birds sleep tucked under…
- By HUGO DOS SANTOS Despite the brief streaks of self- belief, a stubborn defeat pervades. Absent a job, absent a title. I want to declare: a great undoing has taken place. And I don’t know where to search for the bricks that once made up the house of who I used to be. My children sense what I have not told them. …
- by JULIET MCSHANNON The dog is crossing a circle. Dawn light catching silver strands on a gray coat, saliva on a panting tongue, a red collar. A lost dog. For an instant, we lock eyes, then I continue around and take the north exit. I’m in a hurry to get to the meet-up point. My first time running with others and I’m dreading it, but doctor’s…
- By NATALIE LINH BOLDERSTON A story is an offering— something with a bright, burstable skin and tender flesh. Whenever my mother gives me one of her stories, I watch her cut into it, lay it out for me in a way I can consume, in a way she can bear. Her stories simmer in her muscles, ready to emerge at a flick of her wrist, a familiar flare of joy…
- By FATIMAH ASGHAR what does it mean, to be free? i sip coke at my phuppos, azaadi on the walls of the university, free kashmir sprawled, azaadi on my body. when i walk the streets of lahore men stare. can i write the poem that makes me free, that brings azaadi to my lips? i say i want to drink…
- By LAUREN DELAPENHA consider articulation, both speech and the assembly of a joint, the cooperation of bones and marijuana; English: Mary Jane: shoe, or the talentless friend you secretly love who is also the pretty, skirted woman in Spiderman who keeps getting suspended, screaming, from skyscrapers, and there, dangling, you will begin to apprehend English, which is both to fear and to understand the difficult…
- By DÉLANA R. A. DAMERON Excerpted from Fairfield County When asked what number Pal O Mine should run under, Moses had said, “Number seven or number three. Them’s divine numbers, alright. God made this whole world in seven days. And He’s a trinity: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Cain’t go wrong with three neither.” It wasn’t often that a Negro…
- By BORIS DRALYUK for Ange Mlinko Of C. H. Krumm—Charles Harrison, or Harry— a single trace remains on Catalina, so oxidized, so salt-worn I could barely make out the name. How many must have seen it while rambling from or trudging to the ferry and given it no mind, no second look? Lone lettered slat, corroded tongue depressor, marking the island’s only casualty of…
- By FATIMAH ASGHAR not even you who caused it. & no one can take my madness not even my honied friends who try to pull me back from the edge of myself, who update each other in the groupchat of how my body is wasting how i’ve stopped eating, frail, my withering wrists. no one can take my vengeance, not the…
- By DYLAN CARPENTER To win you back, I wrote in vain Of a place only the two of us know. Where snow when it snowed wasn’t snow. Where rain when it rained wasn’t rain. That was the world. That was the place Where we lived— But ordinary things, When they fell from our hands, made noise And stars thrown…
- By ALEKSANDAR HEMON I’ve learned that a small amount of painkill blooms into a heartbreak, just as the moon sinks in the ocean, smears and dissolves, depleted by the longest of hopeful nights. There was a time when all that love made sense. And yet, we are back home now, reproducing clichés, reshaping the ancient mistakes, blending snot with tears…
- By MARIA TERRONE The sign painted on the truck is a phrase I contemplate under a vine-covered pergola. You might call this walled city garden my hermitage—the faint notes of a live flute from an open window harmonizing with a robin’s song. Sirens break my reverie. “Police, fire, or medical assistance?” the voice always…
- By LAUREN ACAMPORA When Nayana came out of the garbing room, Noah forgot all about the pinworms. He forgot about the perianal tape test he’d just done on the sentinel mouse in Room 8, and he forgot about the disinfecting he’d have to do for the rest of the week. He forgot about the yellow paper gown, elastic hair bonnet,…
- By ANDREW STEINER The first time I saw Lake I was sitting on the bench between sets, waiting for the burn in my chest to subside. She walked past me to the big cage and slung her duffel to the floor. I watched with idle interest as she wrapped her wrists with soft black straps and wrangled her hair into a high loop. Her rose-colored Alphaletes came up well…
- By LYNNE THOMPSON they didn’t find us beautiful. The haters let our skin slip, slowly, from our bones, satiated our thirst with sludge and brine water, led us to wrathful prayers offered in caves. If they didn’t find us beautiful, it was…
- By RU FREEMAN Eudora writes to William about roses Mr. Hennessey’s Gloire Dijon Beauty of Glazenwood found on the sides of barns its yellow flaked with red caught only from the windows of passing trains & he to her as well of scented posies Lady Hillingdon ascending somewhere down a Paris street the fragrant double petaled Gruss an Aachen pluming with its rosettes Hard…
- By PETER CAMPION Our hour at the clinic, test results and what the doctor guessed. Then the bright intensity out on Industrial Boulevard, the late October sun so hard and air so crisp that everything felt close and brash and nearly stung. Silent, you walked next to me. And I was there to comfort you, but doing what you had to…
- By STEFAN BINDLEY-TAYLOR His left wrist dangled out the half-wound-down glass of a boxy brown Cadillac with red felt seats. Flies drifted in and out. He had a dip top cone in his hand. The place was famous for them. You’d think it would be melting in the heat, but the molten chocolate shell held the ice cream within firm and cold. The air…
- By GEOFFREY BROCK Dream 1: In which he annoys her It was New Year’s Eve when he showed up, in the sleety weather, in his old flannels, to knock on our door again. You’re back! my wife cried. I missed you! He laughed, and as they hugged he lifted her gently into the air—that’s when she remembered he was dead.…
- By LAUREN DELAPENHA The miracle of the chain: here, you could be anywhere and still find the same winter tomatoes (Greece, California, Spain), the same post-Pilates ableists palming the treeless fruit for bruising. Last night, a dream: pushing my cart with the singing wheel through these neon aisles of peppers (Peppers! Peppers! All aligned, ample, capable, rich!), I found …
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.
Table of Contents Issue 31
Fiction
Sindya Bhanoo, “Dead Man’s Association”
Russell Brakefield, “The Strays”
DéLana R. A. Dameron, “Pal O Mine”
Liz DeWolf, “Ex Situ”
Andrew Steiner, “Working In”
Juliet McShannon, “Rescue”
Lauren Acampora, “Husbandry”
Essays
Natalie Linh Bolderston, “A Story is an Offering: Notes on Storytelling and Inherited Memory”
Ro Skelton, “Naow’s Boutique”
Emily Nemens, “The Back Meets the Nose”
Poetry
Hugo dos Santos, “Undoing”
L. S. Klatt, “U N C O N T A I N A B L E”
Rachel Hadas, “Deaccessioning”
Dylan Carpenter, “Fantasia”
Olena Jennings, “Leaving Lviv”
J. J. Starr, “* * *”
Lauren Delapenha, “If You Are Learning English”
Lauren Delapenha, “Supermarketing”
Ezza Ahmed, “In Place of River I’ll Use [God]”
Ezza Ahmed, “My Cousin Thinks I Gave Her Nazr”
Geoffrey Brock, “My Wife Dreams of My Father”
Lynne Thompson, “By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended, and still”
Aleksandar Hemon, “The Spies”
Peter Campion, “Both Sides of Winter”
Stefan Bindley-Taylor, “Jesus’ Body Found Outside Ice Cream Parlor in Black Suburb”
Ru Freeman, “Ponder Heart”
Fatimah Asghar, “[Freedom Song]”
Fatimah Asghar, “[No one can take my anger]”
Daniel Tobin, “The Grave Fox”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Nocturne for Dark Things”
Maria Terrone, “Safe & Secure Destruction”
Boris Dralyuk, “Legion”
Art
