By CARLOTA GURT
Translated by ADRIAN NATHAN WEST
The three of you get into the car. The girls buckle their seatbelts. You turn the key. The spark plug ignites the fuel in the combustion chamber. You depart. It is only thanks to fire that you’re moving.
“Mom, how long is it gonna take?”
Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
On July 4, 1981, something caught Evie Weinstein’s eye as she was washing dishes in a tidal pool on Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless island off the Maine coast. An Atlantic puffin, a football-sized seabird, emerged from the pea-soup fog with something dangling from its beak. Evie dropped the dishpan, grabbed the binoculars slung around her neck, and saw that the puffin had a beak-load of fingerling fish. She had been waiting for this moment and knew at once what it meant: the bird was bringing food for a chick—a puffling, as they are called in children’s books—the first to hatch on the island in a century, and the first seabird hatched anywhere as the result of a conscious human effort to restore them to a place from which they had been exterminated.
By ZORAIDA BURGOS
Translated by PETER BUSH
OUR VERY OWN EQUILIBRIUM
Wearily, but firmly, we twisted
our feeble trunks
around a stump
alone but not sad amid other trees,
entangled roots
clinging till the last
to our rough stony ground.
We grow two shoots
bringing hope to our landscape
when a ruddy wing on the bare
mountain horizon
heralds a threatening wind downstream.
Thoughtfully, carefully,
we’ve been turning our mud,
our clay, bare-fingered,
with the strength of truth,
of harsh truth dead reborn,
our hands tightly clasped.
And nothing, no wind, no clouds, no rain, no threats
will shake
the stump, clay or mud, and these shoots,
for wearily,
but firmly,
we’ve made them our own.
We are stretching towards each other,
words tangling. The words can’t always
be torn apart. Sometimes you
are ти. Sometimes we touch.
“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
if other faculties are failing too…
like hearing, perhaps. A few seconds later,
though, we enjoy a breakthrough,
as our breezy, blow-dried commentator
re-airs his catchphrase, which I move to clarify
by relaying it slowly:
“Happy. And. Free.”
… At day’s end, even so, I might prefer
happy and furry, as though she
might yet retrieve days when all of us were
that peculiar entity, a big family—
father, mother, four boys of various
ages and stages—become, like any true family,
inhabitants of a lair,
wound and bound in a low common smell
(our own must of sweat and hair),
that familial furriness which cordons off a small
walled area while informing a potentially
invasive world, This is us.
Happy and furry. The woman’s five years dead,
yet just last week the phrase returned
as I, watching a YouTube clip, was shepherded
to an obscure nature site by a tag that posed
a teasing test: TRY NOT TO CRY AS MAMA CHIMP
MOURNS BABY. The test? Frankly, I’m not sure I passed.
Embarrassed, as if being watched, I felt
my eyes prickle as the blinking simian—so loving,
so darkly puzzled—stroked and stroked the silky pelt
of a torso strangely limp
whose russet fire still burned,
though warming neither the dead nor the living.
… Furry, then, if not free. We mishear,
misread, we go on misspeaking,
and if our errors pain us, soon they disappear
into an unseen, unseeable, ever-amassing crowd.
Click here. Click. Now. Always, the furious din out there,
and what do our answers count, everything so loud
and larger always than yesterday? We learn to chart
our growth by the billion-, trillion-fold:
Vaster, faster numbers. See me. Click. Give me your heart,
click. Like me…. So many voices, all seeking,
as I suppose both mothers were, the warm, the old,
the furred primordial lair.
Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poetry, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. A former theater critic for Time, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
By AMY STUBER
Alice wants to walk on the trail, but Renee wants to wander. At least that’s what I imagine.
Maybe Alice tells Renee, “It takes two hours to get to the lake. Let’s keep moving,” and probably Renee heads down offshoot paths to get closer to the falls. In the first half-hour, on their way to the lake at the peak, they see a fox, a mother and baby moose, and three animatronic-looking deer.
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE.
Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.
Table of Contents:
The Common Fall Launch Party—Locals Night!
Join The Common for the launch of Issue 28! We welcome four esteemed contributors who happen to be local: Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol. Issues will be available for purchase. We’ll have brief readings, a short Q&A, and lots of time to mingle!
Left to Right: Iqra Khan, James K. Boyce, Douglas Koziol, Brad Leithauser
Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UW Madison. She is also a winner of the 2024 Disquiet Prize in poetry and the Frontier Global Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, Swamp Pink, The Rumpus, among others. Her work is centered around collective nostalgia, Muslim credibility, and the Muslim burden of becoming.
Poet, novelist, essayist, Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books, the most recent of which is Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poems, will be published by Knopf next spring. He is a former theater critic for Time, and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
James K. Boyce is an author, naturalist, and environmental economist. He is the recipient of the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award. “Return of the Puffin” is adapted from his book-in-progress, Our Better Nature. Website: www.jameskboyce.com.
Douglas Koziol is a writer living in Western Massachusetts. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Quarterly West, The Millions, and Lunch Ticket, among other places. He received his MFA from Emerson College.
ADRIE KUSSEROW and LEAH ZANI are a rare sort: trained cultural anthropologists and poets, anthro-poets. The two met while Adrie was judging the Ethnographic Poetry Prize, the world’s only prize for poetry written by anthropologists. Shortly after, they began working together on the editorial team of Anthropology and Humanism, one of the few peer-reviewed academic journals that accepts poetry.
In this interview, Leah Zani connects with Kusserow about her latest memoir, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of prose poems based on Kusserow’s experiences with refugee communities and humanitarian projects in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. In this conversation, they discuss the lyricism of suffering and the role of poetry in enriching deep anthropological understandings of place.
By JADE SONG
Hu Tianbao waves to asphalt and sky. The bumper of his mother’s car has long since exited the drop-off zone, yet he still stands moving his arm in the building’s entrance doorway. Left right left right dawdles his hand. A farewell to punctuality. He’s alone, everyone else already nestled in their classrooms, reciting poems.
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