I still had a lover. Maybe let’s start there.
I hitched a ride to Boston, where I missed
the ferry by what seemed like minutes. But time
can work that way in the mind. I was in love
By ANNA BADKHEN
In the early morning, when pink Oklahoma dawn crept over the sturdy single-family bungalows and strip malls, Abu Khaled al Shimeri wrapped his left arm around the taut belly of his pregnant wife, Fatima, and had a troubled dream.
A dimly lit maze of unpaved streets ended in front of a tall limestone wall. The sky above the wall was luminescent blue, but no sunshine reached the crepuscular base where he was standing barefoot. Behind the wall were the sacred streets of al Quds. Abu Khaled knew that the gilded dome of al Aqsa Mosque was only a few hundred paces away. He could hear a busy market on the other side, peddlers hawking live chickens and honey, women bargaining over the price of lamb. But no matter how hard he looked, he could not see a gate, not even a crack in the wall through which he could squeeze his wilting, middle-aged body.
“God!” he pleaded. “Please let me into the blessed city!”
My friends were aware of the wish I nurtured.
If I had a daughter,
I would name her Srividya!
I was not influenced by any actor.
Our prayer room hosted a dazzling
crystal Sri Yantra on the holy altar.
By SASHA STILES
The Common is thrilled to welcome Sasha Stiles to our pages for the first time.
Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
What does it mean to be human in a nearly posthuman era? How are the cornerstones of our universal condition—birth, breath, love, sex, faith, death—evolving in the context of biological and computational advances? How does it feel to be mostly flesh and blood in a world increasingly dominated by plastic and silicon, virtual presence and spectral signals? What dark corners of the future and of cyberspace can ancient wisdom illuminate? What does motherhood mean in a world of artificial wombs, lab-grown brains, self-replication, and the uncertain continuation of our species as we know it? Who are these robots, chatbots, androids, cyborgs and intelligences already walking and talking amongst us? Do our avatars make us, in some measure, immortal? TechnELEGY—the ongoing transmedia project and poetry collection from which these pieces are excerpted—is my attempt to grapple with these impossible questions.
—Sasha Stiles
With ALDA SIGMUNDSDÓTTIR
Your name: Alda Sigmundsdóttir
Current city or town: Reykjavík
How long have you lived here: 25 years
Three words to describe the climate: Blustery, cool, refreshing.
Best time of year to visit? Summer for midnight sun; winter for northern lights.
We’d love for you to join us in Amherst to celebrate the launch of Issue 18. The Common‘s student interns will be reading briefly from their favorite pieces in the new issue, and seniors will read from their own writing as well. There will be wine, cheese, and great conversation.
Friday, November 1, 5 p.m.
Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Frost Library
Amherst College
Come toast the latest place-based stories, essays, poems and artwork! We’ll be gathering in Frost Library’s beautiful Center for Humanistic Inquiry, on the Amherst College campus. This event is free and open to the public; bring your family and friends! You can also invite other lit lovers via our Facebook event page.
Curated by: SARAH WHELAN
Issue 18 is almost here! Pre-order your copy today to enjoy brand-new fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork arriving on October 28th. If waiting by the mailbox isn’t your thing, countdown to the magazine’s arrival with book recommendations from some of our Issue 18 contributors.
Recommendations: Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven; Loves You: Poems by Sarah Gambito; A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa; The Farm by Joanne Ramos; and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors.
Poems by MARIO SANTIAGO PAPASQUIARO
Translated from the Spanish by COLE HEINOWITZ
Poems appear in both Spanish and English.
Translator’s Note
A, E, I, O, U. The rhythmic concatenation of these five vowels is the tachycardic pulse of Mario’s poetry, and it cannot be imitated in English. Feeling for correlative patterns in the jangle of our consonant-frontal idiom is something like transcribing the pitch values of a Max Roach drum solo for honkeytonk piano. I do what I can with alliteration but even the relatively long decay of the M or the out-hissing S does not match the multi-textured overtones of a hard O spilling through the rails of its word-cage when struck, trailing a foam of soft E’s across the rubble.
In his thirty years of work in publishing, my grandfather never once revealed to his colleagues he was gay. Doing so could have cost him his job as a children’s book editor at a prestigious house, or at the very least, his reputation as an honest, hard-working family man. It took me only ten minutes, in a phone interview with the same publishing house, to accidentally out him.
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