Jay Boss Rubin | Review of Exemplary Humans
Husbandry
LAUREN ACAMPORA
He felt like a madman, an ogre in a backpack, people stepping out of his way in the narrow alleys. He imagined that every rubbled structure was Nayana’s house, every woman her mother, every girl her sister.
A Story is an Offering: Notes on Storytelling and Inherited Memory
NATALIE LINH BOLDERSTON
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 or pain.
Supermarketing
LAUREN DELAPENHA
For example, the last time I asked God / to kill me I was among the lemons, remembering // the preacher saying, God is a God who is able / to hunger. I wonder, // aren’t we all here for that fast / communion of a stranger reaching // for the same hydroponic melon?
Searching for Meaning: Chukwuebuka Ibeh interviews David Emeka
DAVID EMEKA
One of the stories I worked the hardest on last year began with me being perplexed by beauty. The meaning of beauty in popular discourse. I had come to a point where I thought: I don’t know what “hot” means; I don’t know what all these words that are supposed to describe human beauty truly signify.
The Constancy of Ocean Sounds
JOHN T. HOWARD
Another morning in New Harbor arrives, this time with sun in place of cloud and fog. The waves, still audible, seem almost louder than yesterday. The dunting off in the near distance swallowed up by the constancy of ocean sounds. Tumult, clamor, crash.
Book Review: Exemplary Humans
JAY BOSS RUBIN
When we first witness her breakfast routine, in the novel’s opening pages, it’s quite charming: she spreads globules of milkfat, along with softened butter, onto her not-so-fresh bread, then dunks the bread in her hot, milky coffee. “The fat is rich and the old woman’s entire body tingles.” (Sometimes Natalia is “I,” sometimes she is “Natalia,” and most often she is “the old woman.”)
- ROBERT CORDING my mother and her mother, / four heart attacks and two open-heart surgeries / between them, breathing heavily, / but still going, arms and hands dipping / and rising, their feet skipping and hopping, / as if a speeded-up polka was a form of time / travel
- MARTHA COOLEY Despite all my jiggling, the key didn’t work. My husband had had the locks changed a few months earlier, when our tenants left, and neither of us had remembered I’d need a new key. Home had become a word without a referent.
- TAMAS DOBOZY My other aunt, Lilian, has towering black hair, like a cross between a 1950s country singer and a still of a vampire’s mistress from silent-era horror. Pornography, she sneers, is the scrawl of perverts on the walls of ancient Greece.
- REBECCA WORBY Red, red blood, not the dark red of a period. I know this immediately even though I have only just had my first period in years, and as alarm bells go off in my mind, I begin to sweat, my heart suddenly clanging. It’s only day twelve of my cycle, as far as I’ve calculated, so it’s clear…
- CARSON WOLFE The morning after I had woken to him / holding his flashlight beneath my bedsheets, // I told him I felt too sick to go to school. / It’s always confused me, why I chose // to stay in his house another full day, / waiting for my mother to finish work. // Like any other, we played
- JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN That’s us, always leaping into the getaway car of daydream, / lit up lavender & tangerine. We are dancing with our mouths / like no one is listening because no one is listening but us. / It’s the wild freedom of silly gooseness, feathers to cushion being told / you’re useless, repeatedly, while still being used for everything.
- PEDRO POITEVIN I am the madness of the grand design, / I am the limit of where reason goes, / I am the science behind metascience. // The endless universe of sets is mine, / and this includes the cheeky set of those / denying my existence in defiance.
- ANNA MALIHON Put down your toy death. / Go, return the sun’s face / to the longest night for me. / Here are peonies and June, / and soldiers tightly standing. / And never, / never will anyone leave you again…
- ALLISON FUNK You must leave everything you’ve carried / to enter the tomb, says the guide / pointing to the passage grave / mounded / with earth. From outside, / the tumulus all but obscures / death’s reach, / also its fruitfulness...
- A. J. BERMUDEZ Now, Khalida notes, here’s where it gets interesting. She explains that, under Moroccan inheritance law, the vote on what to do with a property must be unanimous among shareholders. In other words, if fifteen brothers wish to sell their father’s property, but the sixteenth brother disagrees, the property cannot be sold. Such was the exact case of…
- LAUREN CAMP What is it like to be found? All these years on, I’ve never before been / to the edge of this rocky square state. I drive 41 through aura and wither / and slip into Golden then out to Stanley and right on 60. // Beside the road, dust chafes and three shapes of mountains. / Keen winds…
- VIKTOR NEBORAK A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons / on these civilians as on military echelons / and then been posthumously awarded // the highest orders! his name on honor lists! / banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks! / … if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.
- MARC VINCENZ It seems all the light of morning / has descended here where it’s usually dark / and frogs raise their heads in the bulrushes, / where the last sounds swarm among the oaks. / Weighing these few scraps, the things you’ve said / you leapt gardens to procure—there are still / more feathers on this side—hard work, /…
- ANNA MARIA HONG To your beached blessings, add this curse: / not making worse what glass makes / so clear but neither smoking the path to your impaneled store, absconded / documents across your bathroom floor, / public security, national writ walled in / where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
- THE MEAD ART MUSEUM More than thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent states that emerged from its territory continue to grapple with its legacies. In Ukraine, this struggle has unfolded amidst a political and cultural war waged by Russia.
- DIANA KEREN LEE My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul. / Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts. / As fires burn halfway around the world. // Connect the dots between each falling flake. / My brothers and I were born, making five of us— / a star, a line that returns to where…
- ANNIE SCHUMACHER It is as if I were seeing time / or the whole story I once knew / laid across the altarpiece of my mind / as piercing and startlingly beautiful / as the glance of the beloved. // And I see the world suddenly in its true form: / God has no body other than mine. / I…
- MICHAEL ROBINS The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions
- LAURA GERINGER BASS She longed to get wet, a quick dunk, but the ocean was now empty of bathers, the dune behind Carla darkened by a long line of masked vacationers toiling up the incline in a laborious exodus, slowed by the necessity of maintaining a safe distance from one another’s sliding footsteps in the sand. It exhausted her just…
- ALBERTO DE LACERDA The architecture of the sleeves— / White— / As she composes her response / To a letter / (On the marble floor / The seal / Jumps / From the crumpled letter) // Delft / Labyrinth / Externalized / In frank meditation / Serene // The clarity / (Coming from the panes) / The shadows / The…
- MOISEI FISHBEIN And stay like that, and live / until you’re fully alive, / live in your skin, and live / as in strange primordial times / when waves and the wind heard / no voices between them, / now there’s only heat, / only the warm pebble beach, / only waves, and a distant / cold whitecap hits warm…
- CORY BEIZER Eventually everything falls into disorder. That was what my physics minor taught me in college. When I met with the dietitian, I wanted to explain the law of entropy to her. That the chemical energy of food we consume is low-entropy, and the resulting heat energy we produce is high-entropy.
- MATT W. MILLER My dad could be tough and distant / and push a little too hard into what hurt // but if God pulled that Isaac shit on him, / saying “I want you to sacrifice your son / for me” it never would have got as far / as me strapped to some Moriah altar. // If I…
- JAMES RICHARDSON Indifference is far more efficient / than fission or fusion / as a weapon of mass destruction, / and far less problematic / than uranium or tritium / to procure, occurring, / as it does, massively in nature. // It can kill at a distance, / and without a delivery system...
- ELIZABETH METZGER Part of her knows he will withdraw again / once they get home. Part of her thinks / this is the new love she’s pined for. / They swing their real invisible children between them. / Loving best in reflections, / they make each child again together. / This could be our life, she thinks / as the…
- GRAY DAVIDSON CARROL In the kitchen, I cry to the sound of my mother’s sobs. / Count the injections I have left before the vials run out. / There is no point in asking how, in asking why. Empire / does not answer questions. Genocide does not answer / questions—the answers were right there.
- TEJU COLE I really believe in the novel as an innovative form. Yet I didn’t want novelty for its own sake. There had to be something necessary in how I approached the narrating. For me, this was a puzzle to be solved, this work of arriving at the many different ways a character might give an account of what it…
- SASHA BURSHTEYN The slagheap dominates / the landscape. A new kurgan / for a new age. High grave, waste mound. / To think of life / among the mountains— / that clean, clear air— / and realize that you’ve been breathing / shit. Plant trees / around the spoil tip! Appreciate / the unnatural charm! Green fold, / gray pile.
- ELSA LYONS Then I understood. Ellen was translucent. It wasn’t just her skin; all of her was less solid, almost ghostly. One day she might be totally transparent. And then what? How could Dr. Lopez have missed this? And Andrew? Well, it was still very slight. Maybe only a mother could notice something so subtle.
- JENNIFER ACKER "My horse was called Emmy, short for Emerald Star. Dad’s more mature, larger mount was named Sassafras, which he shortened to Sassy. If we hadn’t taken these girls home, they’d have been shipped to the glue factory. A pony may be the birthday wish of many young girls, and I was no exception.
- WYATT TOWNLEY Not the girl / after the party / waiting for boy wonder // Not the couple / after the test / awaiting word // Not the actor / after the callback / for the job that changes everything // Not the mother / on the floor / whose son has gone missing // I am the beloved /…
- CUSH RODRIGUEZ MOZ There’s doubt about the provincial and national governments: if they had built additional infrastructure during the five years leading up to the flood, a time during which the region’s hydraulic installations went untouched. And there’s doubt about the inhabitants: if they hadn’t been so reluctant to lose a tourist season.
- CASEY WALKER For the farewell trip, Elle and I arrived at the house to find Matthew and John already unpacking in their bedrooms. I stood for a moment in my mother’s study. It was still filled with her legal books and paperback mysteries. Someone would have to sort those books, discard them, and probably the job would be mine.
- REBECCA FOUST You & I will grow old, Love, / we have grown old. But this last chance // in our late decades could be like the Pleiades, winter stars seen by / Sappho, Hesiod & Galileo & now by you & me. // Let us be boring like a hollow drill coring deep into the earth to find /…
- LAWRENCE JOSEPH what we do is // precise and limited, according to / the Minister of Defense, // the President / is drawing a line, // the President is drawing / a red line, we don’t want to see / a major ground assault, the President says, / it’s time for this to end, / for the day after to begin, he says, // overseer of armaments procured
- CASEY WALKER Casey Walker speaks to Emily Everett about his story “Islands,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue.
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—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »
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