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Notes on Looking Back

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays, Podcasts & Audio, Translation

The Common Magazine · “Notes On Looking Back” by Steven Tagle

Last year, I wandered through Greece, knocking on all the gates of Hades. I walked along the Acheron River, whose icy blue waters seemed colored by the spirits of the dead. Stalactites dripped onto the back of my neck as a silent boatman ferried me through the caves of Diros. I searched for the entrance to the sea cave at Cape Tainaron, scrambling over sharp rocks below the lighthouse as darkness fell. Sometimes I wondered if my search for the underworld tempted the Fates. I remembered Orpheus, the father of music, who charmed beasts with his lyre and descended into Tainaron to find his lost bride, Eurydice. With song, he implored Hades and Persephone to bring her back to life, and his words moved the deathless gods to tears. They granted his wish, allowing him to lead her out of the underworld on one condition: he must walk ahead of her, not looking back until they left the dark halls of death. Approaching the surface, the farthest reach of light, Orpheus feared his love’s silence behind him. He turned to look and saw her sink back into the depths, reaching out to him and bidding him farewell for the last time.

Last Cigarette

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By TOM SLEIGH

After the explosions, the big one of the Big Bang,
the little one of the firecrackers set by some kid

The Streets These Days

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By J. KATES

The life-size and realistic bronze has stood on its parklet street corner for so long that no one remembers whom it represented or what it memorializes. The sculptor had done a good job. It looks pleased with itself, proud of its accomplishments in life.

Someone’s hat, an ordinary tweed cap, green and brown, not even worth describing, has fallen off, blown away, and come to rest upside down on the pavement underneath the bronze. Slowly the cap is filling up with coins and bills from passers-by. Clearly, they think this is not public art, but a street-artist slathered in metallic paint from head to foot, holding a pose. And the cap must be his.

A man has stopped to look. He is underdressed for the weather and disturbingly unkempt, talking out loud with nobody to listen. In the old days, we would have taken him to be schizophrenic. Nowadays, surely he must be wearing earbuds and conversing with his girlfriend. We do not give him a second glance. He continues exchanging messages with his teeth.

The bronze figure looks pleased with itself.

We drop a quarter in the cap.

Escaping East

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY

It was like going on holiday, permanently.
Even though I was six, I steered my own ship –
or pretended to, perched atop suitcases,
rolling along the corridors at Frankfurt International.

Ad Campaign for Truthiness

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By VERNITA HALL

Bottled Water Tastes Better
through a straw

because Things Go Better with Plastic.
Recyclable is the new biodegradable

because the light at the end of the tunnel
only seems brighter in a fairy tale.

Opulence

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By RICHIE HOFMANN

The night river calms me with its slow dirty movements.
I walk home briskly, in a black baseball cap.
I work at the fringes of the day. I write poetry in bed
and criticism in the bath.
Among my friends here, I have a man
who calls me love names
in four languages. Once, in a moment, I thought I wanted to die
of his pleasure, but that was a wound
speaking. The history of this place
abounds with wounds.
Mobs of vandals have ransacked the villas.
A very rich man on his deathbed
from a corrupt family who loves the arts
was fed a medicine of powdered pearls.

Sandstorm

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By RASHA ALDUWAISAN

The Common Magazine · Sandstorm by Rasha Alduwaisan

There’s an itch in my throat like fox fur,
broom bush, cactus whittled to dust,
and my son thinks the city has vanished,

An Orient Free of Orientalism: Magic, the square, and women in Moroccan short fiction

May 18, 2021 Essays, Issue 21, Issue 21 Essays, Translation

By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by MADELINE EDWARDS

Morocco has long been associated in the Arab imagination with magic and superstition, casting off mystical curses and exorcising jinn from the body. The word “al-Moghrabi” (“the Moroccan”) has itself become yet another qualification claimed by those who work in this parallel world, adding it to their names, some going so far as to christen themselves “Sheikh from Morocco.” These are the men one hears about from time to time, those who help ancient treasure-seekers get their hands on spell-protected troves, perhaps of the sort guarded by serpents.

Trap Street

April 26, 2021 Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

By KAREN SKOLFIELD

“[T]he existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact.” —Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Amsterdam (1997)

Twitch of the cartographer’s hand and a street
is born, macadam free, a tree-lined absence,
paved with nothing but a name. No sidewalks,
no chalk, no children’s voices,
a fence unlinked from its chains,
the cars unmoored, corn left to its rubble,
some wandering mailman, a house unbuilt,
the bricks unlayed, the mortar unmixed;
of the things that hold more things together
the cementitious crumbles on this street,
the lime breaks from the shale, the shells
from their marl and clay. On trap streets
the rules of gravity bend, curve to the mountain
or fight it, dog leg the impossible angle,
ribbon the gulley, shimmer from heat,
unspool. Cliff walk, some miracle mile
meant only for goats, a meander of cloven hooves,
a stitching of strip mines, red earth or white,
ground that, once spotted, we call disturbed.

Misdirection

April 26, 2021 Fiction, Issue 21, Issue 21 Fiction, Issues, Poetry Recordings

By AMALIA GLADHART

The Common Magazine · “Misdirection” by Amalia Gladhart

For years, I have tried to describe the light: the dry, dry gold; the purple peaks of our horizon; the long-armed valleys sliding off the peaks. Craters tinseled after frost, glaciers before the recent years of drought. Late-afternoon glow over brown dirt walls, valley floors blasting green with sugar, and the black volcanic rock of the single mountain without snow. Light like liquid gold against the brown, radiant gold drizzled across the ridges.

And then I try to name a lack of light, the mist that isn’t gray and isn’t white and isn’t rain. Light through fog, light instead of fog, fog instead of light. The sparkle of dew along a leaf, even when it seems there isn’t any light at all. Light, and not-light, that you can get lost in. Light that misleads you, leads you on. The flicker of a flashlight through tent walls.