“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters.
Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
taller far than a tall man.”
—Sappho
A brief architectural brief
By JOSÉ PINTO DE SÁ
Translated by JETHRO SOUTAR
Papá announced, “Maria, I’m going to war,” and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. Mamã, clearing the table, gave her usual start. She stood stranded in the kitchen doorway, a dirty plate in each hand.
Going to war meant going out in the dead of night to David’s bar, playing hide-and-seek with military patrols. Our lot’s supporters gathered there after hours, drank a few beers, exchanged questionable information and reliable rumors. It had been the same every night for the last three weeks, since their lot retook the city.
After dinner, Papá would say, “Maria, I’m going to war,” and Mamã would give a start, try to talk him out of it, remind him of martial law and the curfew.
Then, out of desperation, she’d say, “At least wait for the shooting to die down.”
“We need to do more, Mom,” my son tells me. He’s fifteen, supports the Kurdish resistance and fancies himself an anarcho-socialist (“It’s not like being an anarchist, Mom, okay?”). The Young Socialist lives in a state of perpetual indignation about the state of the world. He insists that governments can and should do better, and that capitalism is the root of almost all problems—past, present, and future. He hopes for radical social change, but when I call him an idealist, he’s furious: “It’s practical, that’s all. Marx and Öcalan, their ideas would work if people weren’t just so… stupid. And greedy.” I usually tell the Young Socialist that, because I’m a literature professor, my version of “do more” is of the teaching and writing sort, rather than the man-the-barricades sort, which I know disappoints him. He says: “We’re all complicit, Mom. You’re white and a professor, and there’s no way to escape your own privilege, even if you’re only white by accident.”
By JOÃO LUÍS BARRETO GUIMARÃES
Translated by CALVIN OLSEN
to Alexandra and Ricardo
on the arrival of Gui
We all have credit,
Said the bankers.
A matter of faith.
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger
By BRUCE BOND
When the smoke cleared and took with it the sirens
and the uniforms strung across our sofas,
what remained were rivers, mist, whisper as a habit,
red dawn in the eyes of the sleep-deprived.
In the brush, here and there, beside the highway,
the revenant scent of metal and decay.
By FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ
Winner of the 2020 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack
as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,
not black rock or islands of fog rising individual
in a barrenness of salt. It is not that
By ELIANE MARQUES
Translated by TIFFANY HIGGINS
To Marielle Franco, city councillor, sociologist, and activist in Black and LGBTQI+ movements, who was assassinated along with her driver Anderson Gomes in Estácio in the middle of Rio de Janeiro on March 14, 2018. Those who ordered the crime have not yet been brought to justice.
We are full of bullets from AKs in our heads and in our necks
With stray slugs that enter our bones our backs
We are in the Ecstasy neighborhood
But not dying of love
By ADRIENNE SU
When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center,
the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown.
Jews had been in Henan so close to forever,
they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had found
an exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases.
Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.
Migration was not always out of the places
our families had fled; it had once been to.
Our pantries were “ethnic” not just for the shrimp chips
and wood ears, but as well for the matzah.
Maybe, when asked, Do you celebrate Christmas?,
we were not being checked for Zen or the Buddha.
We didn’t say it in so many words.
The line between Asia and Europe had blurred.
By RUI CARDOSO MARTINS
Translated by DEAN THOMAS ELLIS
There are two twin girls in the courtroom. They look very much alike, with fine blonde hair, tightly bound, and short, pretty noses. One can see they have not yet reached the point in life where twins become separate. If they were to trade places, it would not be easy to tell the difference. But do not look at them in this way. A year and a half ago, a curtain fell between them.
Honolulu
I walk to the park
drummers sit in a circle under a white tent
they have drifted this far way on pacific waves
long feathers tucked behind their ears
they sweat in soft fringed hides
their faces lean and dark
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.