Cigan Valentine

My Five-Thousand-Meter Years

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

The rumor was there was a backdoor into the best running camp in the capital. To get your kid in, there’d better be something wrong with their mind.

Mother drove me to the facility with a note from Dr. Chen in her purse. For four hours, roads splintered and strayed under our wheels. Eventually we arrived at the far Northeast corner: cornfields and silent cranes, tired grey apartments, willow trees bowing their listless branches.

Am I a Fraud? Are We All? An Interview with Aparna Nancherla

September 19, 2024 Interviews

Jennifer Acker and Aparna Nancherla talking at Amherst College's LitFest.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Gwilliam | Amherst College

APARNA NANCHERLA is in a class of her own. A writer, comedian, actor, and podcast host, Nancherla returned to her alma mater, Amherst College, for a conversation with The Common’s editor-in-chief, JENNIFER ACKER, during LitFest 2024. The two discussed her diverse creative portfolio, standup as a mode of self-expression, and her newest memoir-in-essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For a recording of their full conversation and more about LitFest, visit the Amherst College website.

Nicks and Cuts

September 12, 2024 Fiction

By HEMA PADHU

The first time I pick up a razor, I’m twelve, sitting on an upside-down bucket in a poorly lit bathroom. I touch that part of me tentatively and think about making myself bleed. All the other girls at school have had their first period. They huddle together, whispering. When I join them, an air of hushed discretion settles. My father’s razor has a knurled gunmetal handle. A glistening blade is screwed between two metal plates that open like a butterfly’s wing. I squeeze my eyes shut. It’ll hurt. There’ll be blood. Amma will give me a Carefree pad, and it’ll hang awkwardly between my legs. I will no longer be innocent.

Daddyland

August 8, 2024 Poetry

By CIGAN VALENTINE

I.
In my dreams, I see our house,
Strong and proud like a monolith,
A monument to your mythology
Marked by the lighter squares of paint
Behind missing picture frames
And slowly rotting walls.
A hole in the drywall,
The ceiling falling through.

In Diamondville: Five Poems

July 24, 2024 Dispatches

By LAKE ANGELA

Black and white picture of four family members

Courtesy of Marilyn Kreger

Diamondville, Pennsylvania

Meryl: In Diamondville II

Quiet Uncle Peck was just five when the older kids
set him on fire. This was one hundred years ago,
and Grandpa told me the story. The closest hospital
to Diamondville sent him home, saying there was
nothing more they could do. Grandmother Verna took care
of him, anointing his wounds with devotion, rotating
his torso and arms, helping him walk again.

Para-

June 12, 2024 Dispatches

By MARY LEAUNA CHRISTENSEN

Image of a wooded mountain range with gray clouds in the sky and green grass below.

Photo courtesy of author.

Cherokee, NC and Phoenix, AZ

As a child, I watched horror movie after horror movie. An attempt to make myself brave or to make others think I was. And now, I fear I’m manipulative because how much can a person really change. Bones and weight and cartilage can only be altered to certain degrees.

When it comes to film, body horror disturbs me the most. Things that happen to a person’s body without their permission. And sometimes they don’t notice until their bodies are so acted upon that they are grotesque, twisted, so completely othered with pain they are no longer sovereign, but colonized by something outside of themselves.

Nadryw | Feeling Language

June 11, 2024 Essays, Translation

By JONË ZHITIA
Translated from the German by LEANNE LOCKWOOD CVETAN

Piece appears below in English and the original German.

Translator’s note:

This essay, presented here in its entirety, won the 2022 Wortmeldung prize awarded by the Crespo Foundation, and, to me, is the thousand words expressed by the picture of the immigrant soul. The submission theme was: “Ships at anchor, cars in parking lots, but I am the one who has no home. How can flight, exile, and homelessness be put into words?”