Issue 12 Poetry | The Common

11 Warnings: How to Avoid Talking Politics at Parties

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By DENISE DUHAMEL & JULIE MARIE WADE
Adult Supervision Recommended

When your partner comes home with you for the first time, try to prepare her. Explain how they still see you as a child: cake and candles, streamers and balloons, bubblegum and colored pencils as parting gifts. Though you’re twenty-three, your father insists, “You won’t be grown up in my book until I’ve walked you down the aisle.” Expect jokes about Clinton’s impeachment and Hillary’s headbands. Anticipate talk of bootstraps—how “some people” have never learned to pull themselves up. On the refrigerator, George and Laura Bush grin inside a heart-shaped magnet. The radio plays Rush Limbaugh all afternoon.

Nativity Scene

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By KEVIN O’CONNOR
Strange you came onto me at Children’s Mass,
standing in back, minding my unbelief,
as Thomas doubted physical return.

Malbolge

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By ROBERT BAGG

We go through life regretting our mistakes.

One savage quip that can’t be taken back,

one breach of a friend’s trust is all it takes

to wrench a lifelong friendship out of whack.

And Then It Rains

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By KAREN CHASE

See the trace of someone’s hand
in the shorn branches, the tangle
of trees past the flat lawn.

Tum Ab’aj

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By HUMBERTO AK’ABAL

Translated by LOREN GOODMAN

In my town there’s a big rock
called Tum Ab’aj.

The sun and the moon take care of it.

The Noises

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By J. D. MCCLATCHY

My friend with the brain tumor—a grisly glioma
Surgeons can’t get to the bottom of—that on one side
Of his head presses transmitters on the other, hears
A constant, streaming waterwheel of voices and music,
Slopping pails drawn up from who knows where
Each of us has reservoired it all—the dreamhorde,
The broadcasts, bunny hops, back seat schmoozing,
Nixon’s re-election bid, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,”
Cheap café tunes with dummy lyrics, traffic reports,

A Gift Horse

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By TIMOTHY LIU

Her hands kept on
working their way

into my pants even

after the wedding
toast—the evening

merely an excuse

Mary, with Swag

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By ERICA DAWSON

I deserve a steed for this. This ride. The sex
that didn’t need bodies. No straining hip
craned nearly out its socket. Not one flex.
Seduction.

The Women

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By SERHIY ZHADAN

Translated by OSTAP KIN
—Tell me about your new girlfriend, about the one
you’re living with now. What’s between you two?
—The air is between us. I just live with her
the way small children live with their fear.