In the Know
BERGITA BUGARIJA
Iskra studied the layout of the cash drawer, focusing on the denominations, not the men depicted on the bills. If she cared for history, she would have stayed in Croatia, a place where people chose to live in the past. She’d come close to doing so herself.
For the Love of Loons
JAMES K. BOYCE
The human fascination with loons spans cultures and generations. For many who live in the north woods or spend their summers there, it has become a love affair. In 2025, the common loon was named “Bird of the Year” by the American Birding Association.
If It Wasn’t for Heroin
AMIYA MORETTA
My Umatilla grandfather / who had one leg, lived down the road, / hobbled to her heroin loyally. / That’s how / my mom and dad, neighbors whose parents / were good friends and fellow addicts, / met as kids, played together / on Frieda Street, those mornings
Everything Has to Work: Michael Costaris interviews Sigrid Nunez
SIGRID NUNEZ
Everything has to work, and whatever ending there is, it should strike the reader as inevitable. So yes, it is harder to write short fiction. Of course, plenty of writers are capable of producing at least one beauty. But the kind of writer who can produce one fine story after another—that’s definitely a rarer breed than your usual good novelist.
Liminality in Occupied Spaces
NAGHAM ASAL
Liminality is often described as a transitional state, a threshold between what was and what will be. But in my experience, it is not temporary. It stretches. It settles. It becomes a condition of everyday life.
A New Female Gothic in Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells
LAUREN YU-TING BO
Paramaditha does not abstain from widely acknowledged gothic tropes entirely...and yet, Night of a Thousand Hells contains mainly the horror of reality. We are told from the beginning that it's the story of three sisters and that the youngest sister Annisa, “the beautiful one,” has committed an act of terrorism.
- MINDY MISENER I turned on the TV, but the attempt to distract myself made me feel worse. I re-checked the curtains to make sure not even a sliver of the room would be visible from the outside. I felt both alone and watched. I was definitely starting to feel sick.
- JEHANNE DUBROW When my mother lay convalescing / I wasn’t sure how to be a daughter, / if I should press another cup of tea into her hand, / vine myself around her wintery bed, / or go on washing dishes in the kitchen, / each plate a cold, white stone.
- DAN BEACHY-QUICK A sort of lust that the sun will rise tomorrow / as it rose today—. A ripening / into wisdom, or / the lightning-quick flit of a question that wants / no answer, quick as a finch in a pear tree, quick / as a pear, quick as a star / or a sudden tear
- ROBERT CORDING After years without a single dream / of my dead son, he walks into / the living room where I am standing / at the window and holds me tightly / against himself. He feels exactly / as he felt in life—large shoulders / and round chest, thick forearms / and fingers
- PHILIP METRES mid-crawl, poking above the ocean / of rubble seething beneath. Where were they // digging toward? What would we dig up? / Yes, it’s true, a Venus De Milo hung // above the field of baby arms / but she remained a white silence above
- BENJAMIN PALOFF We said a prayer for the rats and fleas as the plague abated. We laid a wreath for Justinian. The streets of London were no longer smoke-choked, just smoking, and Rome started to smell more like Rome. At least whoever remembered “before” said as much.
- ANNA HOGELAND She played for twenty minutes / with those little toys / I listened as I scrolled / to make sure she was still talking / not drowned / and then I let her watch a clip on my phone / while I brushed her hair / with a towel around her shoulders.
- SHANE MORAN The man beside me was from Denmark, / and having heard my accent, his first words / were the Danes are under orders to shoot first. / His eyes seemed to reach out a hand asking / to arm wrestle. So, I shook it and gave him / my name. I showed him Virginia on a map.
- IDE AMARI THOMPSON When you face your Goliath, don’t take no soft rock to he armor / get ya paring knife ann learn how to twis’ & jick it in, / she guiding my hand as / I moved the blade into / hog flesh, so pink it reminded me / of the conch shell shattered and cut
- ELVIS BEGO Her mother had her late. Late for the times, of course, for a first child. She was thirty-three, and here Josephine was now, thirty-three years later, thirty-three herself, and childless, her mother almost sixty-seven and without a toddler to throw her demanding love upon
- JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER We had a quarrel, melee, detonation of hurt— / fisticuffs of invisible disfiguration in the countryside of Spain. / I slept that evening on a reclining lawn chair under the stadium of the sky. / You stayed in the bed, roof overhead.
- RIMA BRUSI She’s saying this because I’m hallucinating a phantom smell, a chemical scent that no one else can smell, and along with this smell has come a compulsion to write constantly and a mercurial mood that pulls me back and forth daily between the sun and the abyss.
- DAVID SERAFINO Gustavo’s cinder block bungalow has no windows, so he’s surprised when he steps out at half past dawn to find a man in an olive uniform digging post holes for a semi-assembled fence scattered in the dusty yard. The soldier stands, puffs his chest, and dusts off his brass buttons.
- MATTHEW LIPPMAN It looked like my daughter getting older / and floating across the sky in a Chagall dream. / After last night I learned that Chagall always put goats in his paintings. / It took me long enough to figure this out even though I had known it all along. / That’s what we do with our paintings.
- ANNA HOGELAND When she came to his house, the lone, dim light in the wide fields, she threw a clump of dry dirt at his window. The curtain opened and his face appeared. Looking dumb with confusion, he pressed his forehead to the glass, and she waved him to come down. He opened the window.
- SHARON DOLIN To see into your life / you must look into the life of things: / take this brass candelabra shaped / into a circular set of stairs that, / when lit, sees into you, seizes / hold of your brokenness and / shows you all growth starts / with a wound.
- JOHN POCH Last night the Earth entered into two meteor showers at once with no moon in the sky, and the weather service said you could see two dozen meteors per hour. Shower/hour. I will go out and see and maybe write a poem, I thought. But when night came, the sky was overcast.
- CAMPBELL MCGRATH We flow in a thousand branching streams / but we rise from a single spring, we are one / among uncountable generations that have been / and the many—should we be so lucky— / to follow our wake across moonlit waters.
- DIANE MEHTA You can’t risk too much Jenga in a lift / but when you leave her, put your foot down, / exit to the steady earth we merely balance on— / you risk collapse, your knife-edge youth / retracts while you are full of spirit and mistakes.
- KAS BERNAYS her voice crackled like a distress signal / interrupted as she told me / how in the bright haze / halfway between borders / and their certainties / the engine’s faltering stutter / had drowned under her daughters’ wails / and all desperation had coiled / into the kick of her unborn son
- NATALIE BAVAR Now, at the coffee shop offering / EPIPHANY, my drink has so much / cinnamon that the flakes stick / to my throat and turn my tongue / bitter. I wonder if this is the taste / of death, if I share the cat’s pink / maw, complicit in allowing the cycle /of scrambling, entrapment, and return / to go on.
- PETER FILKINS bird song laced the particulate air / wind emptied the pines of their whistle / a cloud roamed aimless arriving somewhere / the creek lapped away at its trestles / church bells dormant hung in their towers / avenues basked in the neutral light
- TINA CANE Today’s lively experiment was supposed to be about the virtues of olive oil / and the simple yet sumptuous lifestyle of Italian nonnas maximizing their wellness / by just being themselves but no sooner had I embraced the integrity of handmade / bucatini
- KAROLINA LETUNOVA It’s minus forty outside, and on Baba Lena’s glassed-in balcony the towels have dried stiff and I stand them up on the couch like snow cranes flying north and breathe in their frozen freshness. On a warm winter day of minus twenty Celsius, we could go buy ice cream.
- KERRY JAMES EVANS Mother goes on about doing backflips / and front flips, I’ve always loved the water, / then the phone cuts out, because she insists / on driving down Alabama’s paved back roads / like she’s auditioning for NASCAR, / which, admittedly, would be awesome
- JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ I threw away my Neil Young & Crazy Horse albums. I tipped my waiter a decent amount. I cut my long hair. I voted early on Tuesday morning. I wore a fitted suit for the job interview. I got a job as a civil servant in Paris. I established good credit and got engaged. I got married in the summertime…
- ANDREW STEINER Married at twenty-one and divorced by twenty-five, I crashed into a brand-new life. Suddenly I was free. I hyperventilated on this freedom. I quit a stable job with matching retirement contributions to work for $10 an hour on a failing farm. I took up smoking, dropped acid, drove drunk.
- TINA CANE Like yesterday / I could have cried with relief driving around / this little city running errands with mariachi rancheras blasting / on my radio making the everyday feel extravagant like being / in a film about running errands or some other earlier version
- JUDITH BAUMEL Who can know my fury / at Jacob’s tricks and God’s consent. / After the devastations and the theft, / after the deceptions and the heartbreak, / after the last blessing and the scene at the Jabbok, / it was still the beginning of the story / when two wealthy brothers wept / on each other’s shoulders.
- HANNAH GERSEN We talked in Sophia’s sunny kitchen, sitting at a round wooden table that was scuffed and nicked by three generations of Chafin children. We drank decaffeinated iced tea mixed with lemonade, the only beverage Sophia can stomach these days.
- M. B. MCLATCHEY It was a gold-seal ruse. A double-/ dealing so sublime the gods ordained / it. Settled into their stadium seats, / they wagered on their favorites. Helen, / the imposter bride, circling and circling / the gifted horse. / Her Central Casting / lines to the shadows inside.
- DANIELLE SCHOON This will always be my claim to glory, despite its awful circumstances: the moment that I flew. I will highlight this part of the story when repeating it to my mother and friends back in the States, to take the edge off. But, like any glorified moment, this one did not last long.
- ALLYSON NOMAN When I see the Sikh in my memories, he becomes my cousin Amir; a distinct echo in their facial features merging into one. Amir and I were told we were meant to marry from a young age. As children, we’d been running on the deck of his home one warm afternoon when I split my big toe open…
- KAREN CHASE up it goes into the stars, for / sustenance. I open / my eyes and pray— / You have returned within me, my / soul with compassion. / Modah ani lefaneka melechai / chai vekayam shehehezarta // I get out of bed, / join the revolution.
- AMIYA MORETTA My Umatilla grandfather / who had one leg, lived down the road, / hobbled to her heroin loyally. / That’s how / my mom and dad, neighbors whose parents / were good friends and fellow addicts, / met as kids, played together / on Frieda Street, those mornings
- SAMUEL KỌ́LÁWỌLÉ The hyena boys came to Bonaventure, which was serendipitous, because he was used to avoiding the world before the world spurned him. For one, his white albino skin flecked with dark spots made him a regular target of mockery.
- JAMES K. BOYCE The human fascination with loons spans cultures and generations. For many who live in the north woods or spend their summers there, it has become a love affair. In 2025, the common loon was named “Bird of the Year” by the American Birding Association.
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 Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »
Read, read, read. Never miss an issue.
Home
