Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,
the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,
the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually
living it. This time around, let the only fireworks
“… [C]atastrophe is not something awaiting as in the future, something that can be avoided with well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in (not only) its most basic ontological sense is something that always-already happened, and we, the surviving humans, are what remains …. Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic.”
Slavoj Žižek
Apocalyptica, “From Catastrophe to Apocalypse… and Back”
Turntables coated in rust and salt.
Illuminated beneath halogen lamps and stacked on one another like the layers of a wedding cake, the vintage record players boast a thick icing of sodium chloride and iron oxide, the granularity of which almost perfectly emulates the breading of a recently fried chicken finger.
Instead of occupying a warehouse shelf, a basement box, or a landfill, these outdated music makers ended up in a museum display case as witnesses to a singular event that some would define as catastrophic, others tragic, others fascinating. The museum, installed in a train station that hasn’t housed a locomotive for decades, commemorates the flooding and destruction of the town where it is located: Villa Epecuén.
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.
Ontologies
The love the love that massively seizes me,
the typewriter’s
ribbon needs replacing,
the great imperial
power game the price of oil,
a call, a response, I know you know
how precious to care is, the voice on the record on
the turntable is singing.
By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
Kol Nidre
And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.
By ALBERTO DE LACERDA
Translated by MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO
To John McEwan
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)
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.
By 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 fold in and exasperate. The radio sputters its beats.
Assigned to be at a school as the sun has left its felicity
to lead young grades in how to find and trust a poem, but I can’t
see the entrance apart from the fences. I cede to another end
while the sky stays to its razoring blue. I am late. I reimagine late.
And then I am taken, finally, into the gym, late and flummoxed.
I swallow. Set my eyes on 122 tender children, much smaller
than never-ending. At this age they are all swish and unconquerable
hope. A stunned mic waits like a nest below the fluorescents
and I am pointed to use it, to woo the kids into words. I go up—
to the empty middle of the gymnasium, put my teeth to the mesh
and invent a direction. I discard what I intended and ask
these little lighthouses to beam their vibrant lights to the page.
Beam what no one has asked them to find before. Where have you been
lost? They listen for rules but I give none. They tremble
with their little power. Say many lives lead nowhere. Say they huddle
within this town. Its pious blue. Say the verdict of future is here where
hawks skirl and transport. The children’s worries
are the thinnest lessons. There are stories they are moving toward.
Was it chance they had almost all been lost in Wal-Mart in the wipe-out
fluorescence and worshipped wings: Seasonal, Sewing, Tires,
the skittering intersections? Aisles, they ask me
to spell—and they write it, elongating the letters. The energy increases.
They shine as they explain the town’s slickest business as the world
of gone children. At last and thank goodness, they are lit up.
Telling the waves of fear. The breath wet. Their words nervous,
their sinews redefining. Life goes in a blink.
They were all clenched back to parents.
Without embellishment, they were saved.
Lauren Camp is the author of eight books, including In Old Sky, which grew from her experience as astronomer in residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She received a Dorset Prize and was an Arab American Book Award finalist. Camp served as poet laureate of New Mexico from 2022 to 2025. Visit LaurenCamp.com.
National Book Award finalist SARAH SMARSH speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common’s fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama’s best books of the year list.
Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she’s working on next.
By TINA CANE
Photo of Tina Cane by Cormac Crump
On DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY
Between May 1968 and December 1971, poet Diane Di Prima wrote a poetry collection comprised of sixty-three “Revolutionary Letters.” Several years ago, I purchased a rare set of the first thirty-four of Di Prima’s letter poems—typed on long sheets of construction paper, stapled, and hand-corrected in ballpoint pen. Bought as a celebratory gift for myself, after having been awarded a fellowship, it’s a humble yet fierce extravagance. While the booklet appears sturdy, its yellowed pages are somewhat delicate. I rarely handle it—too worried about spilling coffee, or having someone in my house mistake the unassuming bundle for recycling. Most of the time, my sheath of Di Prima poems sits in my bookcase, atop a row of books by Marguerite Duras.
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