By LAKE ANGELA
Akron, Ohio and Opelika, Alabama
Grace: Sunday Services
As a girl in curls and white patent flats, I could criss-
cross worlds—Sicily and Ohio, steaming kitchen
and chilly study. I slipped through serving aperitifs and caffé
corretto, understood Sicilian but wasn’t meant to speak
By WYATT TOWNLEY
Review by AIDAN COOPER
Since it first found me in The Common’s Issue 28, I’ve been hypnotized by Wyatt Townley’s “Wedding Vows.” “Falling is an art,” she says, “we have fallen all the way here.” The poem delights in the homology of movement among everything twirling in the world. And now, in Townley’s latest book of poems, Making the Turn, “Wedding Vows” takes on a whole new twirling world to enjoy. In her fifth poetry collection, falling is an art that constantly recurs, redirects, and finds in the force of moving some give in gravity itself. You can fall forever and in any direction; every instance of being is always in flux. Townley writes, “as word by word you are led / to where you are now standing.”
This month, we’re pleased to bring you poems by BRIONNE JANAE, GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL, and WILBERT TURNER III.
Table of Contents
From left to right: Brionne Janae, Gray Davidson Carroll, and Wilbert Turner III.
YOU GOT TO WALK THAT LONESOME VALLEY
By Brionne Janae
~ after Mississippi John Hurt
and how did you go through it?
and did you keep? did you keep your mind?
you got to walk it for yourself
and on returning what state did you find it in?
as in what state were you in?
were you where you left yourself?
and who was left?
was anyone left?
and how sure were you that you could reach them?
Emily Dickinson Museum (house and grounds), Amherst, MA
Half of Emily’s autumnal garden is sunlit at midmorning, but the little apple and pear trees in the orchard down the hill are shrouded in shadow, and I think of my face as equinox: how I woke last April to thorny vines in my neck coiling up my ear canal, with a numb tongue and drooping left lip and eye: a pox, a palsy on my seventh cranial nerve, inflamed and swollen in its bony channel, its roots and delicate capillaries choked off: Then Space – began to toll, // as all the Heavens were a Bell, / and Being, but an Ear…
Here at The Common, we understand that supporting a diverse exchange of ideas goes hand in hand with making the publishing world more accessible. We strive to make our submission opportunities available to everyone. As we open for fall submissions*, we thought now might be a good time to signal-boost some of our policies and guidelines designed to make this process run smoothly for the widest range of submitters. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! (And we hope to see you in the queue soon!)
By MARLEN HAUSHOFER
Review by BRIANNA BEEHLER
When I was a child, I was afraid to go upstairs by myself at my grandparents’ house. At the top of the stairs was a print of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting, Weeping Woman’s Head with Handkerchief III, and the sight of the woman’s tears found its way into my dreams at night. I didn’t know the painting’s context and the casual violence against civilians in Guernica that it referred to, but the image of the woman’s suffering would give me a sense of vertigo, and in the night I imagined climbing the stairs only to lose my balance on sight of the woman’s tight grip and upturned face.
By TOLA SYLVAN
Photo courtesy of author
Hida Furukawa, Japan 2025
I
I make a list of some observations:
the baby’s cheek, below it
spidery veins like a leaf
stalk of tempura (crab or shrimp? something pink)
pale yellow like a new bud in spring
Excerpted from Jaguar, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.
It was hard to stand out in the family alone. Benito’s parents, tías and tíos, valued children more than they valued money. They valued mothers more than they did models. When a man in the family became a father, he might as well have become a judge, or a reverend. You could be an arsonist, a seasoned gangster. You could even have slept with the priest. But if you became a parent, you would be alright in their eyes.
Tío Esteban was forty-one when he went to prison again. And Tía was older: forty-five. It didn’t seem likely that they would become parents, so all faith in them was lost.
The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.
Consider not teaching, cancelling class, staying at home in bed.
Force yourself to go to campus anyway.
Remind the twelve undergraduates gathered around the seminar table that after the 2016 election, the historian Timothy Snyder published a tiny book called On Tyranny about how democracies fail and authoritarian systems thrive. Present your comments as a reminder. Recognize the pettiness of your annoyance that they haven’t heard of this book. Recognize that it may be misdirected. Understand that fist grabbing your heart as anger.
Translated by LISA MULLENNEAUX
Photo courtesy of Archives Bouanani
This country
My country is this horizon with blank pages
where I see skeletons of broken children
wandering, begging for the light of thin wisps
of stories that might finally appease them
In hands the color of amaranth magic
they hold hippogriffs like dogs
a talisman to protect themselves from the lover
with hair braided into black shapes
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