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Propositions

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By HAIFA’ ABUL-NADI
Translated by ELISABETH JAQUETTE

Coffee

His coffee lasts. It’s what he starts his mornings with, early, and then he drinks half a cup in the mid-afternoon. It keeps him company. Maybe the smell of it fresh is the reason he keeps sipping it, even after it’s gone cold. Or maybe he has other reasons. Maybe he feels a certain duty, a responsibility toward it. His coffee, poured into a paper cup, changes in color, shape, and size each day, depending on the kiosk he buys it from. The man and his coffee spend the whole day together, and then he leaves it on his desk or the first ledge he sees. He abandons it without a last sip, or even a word of farewell. He leaves the paper cup of coffee and returns to his world, trusting that another one will be waiting for him in another kiosk tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

The Shed

April 30, 2018 Essays, Issue 15, Issue 15 Essays

By LIZ ARNOLD

Sixteen years ago, my mother found my father behind the shed on a Saturday morning in June. “Get up off the ground in your good shirt,” she told him, before she understood he was dead. “He looked like he was sleeping,” she told us. “The gun glinted in the grass.”

Seven years after my father’s suicide, I opened the envelope containing police photographs of the scene. He did not look like he was sleeping. Limbs: a swastika. Angles inhuman. Violence and velocity rendered in two hundred pounds of a six-foot man. The gun glinted in the grass—she was right about that.

We Two Women Can Father A Child

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By LINDA ASHOK

While you play with your tresses,
and suckle your diamond with trust,
while you play with the bubbles
in your lime-soda with that straw,
there’s something you are trying
to place and I am missing it.

April 2018 Poetry Feature

April 27, 2018 Poetry

New work by our contributors TINA CANE and TOM PAINE

WORK by Tina Cane

I can’t stop horses as much as you can’t stop horses,”

“Other Horses,” Michael Klein

What is work but a horse is a beast to be one with the broom I bristle

toil tool and trade work is a poem I made is my children is family a broken

Friday Reads: April 2018

April 27, 2018 Reviews

Curated by: SARAH WHELAN

We can’t believe that we’re on the brink of publishing our FIFTEENTH Issue! If you couldn’t make it to our Launch Party, you can still mingle with our Issue 15 contributors in this month’s Friday Reads. When you’re done reading, be sure to purchase your copy of Issue 15 here!

Recommendations: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry by Anne Carson, The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Ask a Local: Teolinda Gersão, Lisbon

April 26, 2018 Interviews

With TEOLINDA GERSÃO

Your name: Teolinda Gersão

Current city or town: Lisboa (Lisbon)

How long have you lived here: since 1965

Three words to describe the climate: sunny, mild, pleasant

Best time of year to visit? spring and autumn, but you can come any time

Scratching Beneath Divinity

April 25, 2018 Dispatches

By HONOR MCELROY

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

It’s a conundrum—where to put the baby in the grime—how to remove him from his blanket and place him on anything in this room. This room is what my husband and I get for $99 a night on Trip Advisor at .2 miles from the Philadelphia airport. The hotel sits in a strangled urban desert—a place bereft of tree, water, flow—a sprawl of light and concrete. This is a hopeless place for trapped people, meant to curb the anxiety about the most unnatural of journeys.

Tesserae Poetry Feature: Part Two

April 20, 2018 Poetry

The Common brings you a special two-part series as a preview to Tesserae: Poetry of Community – A Reading & Celebration of Immigrants & New Americans, coming up on Sunday, April 22 3:30–5pm at The Parlor Room in Northampton, MA; free admission. You can view Part One of the series here.

Part Two – featuring poems by Tamiko Beyer, Leslie Marie Aguilar, and Oliver de la Paz.

Tesserae Poetry Feature: Part One

April 13, 2018 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

The Common brings you a special two-part series as a preview to Tesserae: Poetry Of Community – A Reading & Celebration Of Immigrants & New Americans, coming up on Sunday, April 22 3:30–5pm at The Parlor Room in Northampton, MA; free admission.

Part One – featuring poems by Kirun Kapur, María Luisa Arroyo, and Ocean Vuong.

Trespasser’s Minutiae

April 11, 2018 Dispatches

By ANGELA CANNON-CROTHERS

Finger Lakes Region, New York

I am a trespasser. It’s difficult not to be one when so much of the hills surrounding the Finger Lakes of New York are owned by so many, “somebody else’s.” Even the abandoned Tenny’s Farm, with its heaviness of barren barns and feral fields, is stitched with Posted signs. Nearly daily I hike, or ride my pony, along the top of Grimes Gully with its whispering waterfalls below, to the end of the the Old West Hollow Road: an echo of a carriage road overgrown and barely remembered. It’s not really the end though, it’s a path dismembered by a twelve-foot-high fence that surrounds hundreds of acres of private deer reserve. I press my face to the cold wire, longing for the wide trails that continue inside there. Just being here, though, I’ve passed numerous signs. I am trespassing.