News & Events | Page 2 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

I Stopped Dreaming

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

I denounced abstract expressionism. I became a realist and portrait painter. I started paying my taxes. I flossed my teeth with regularity. I tied my shoes with punctuality. I wore dress shoes for that matter. I no longer sang in the shower. I stopped skateboarding on the weekend. I threw away my Neil Young & Crazy Horse albums. I tipped my waiter a decent amount. I cut my long hair. I voted early on Tuesday morning. I wore a fitted suit for the job interview. I got a job as a civil servant in Paris. I established good credit and got engaged. I got married in the summertime at sunset on the misty beach. I had half a dozen children. They loved me but worked me to the bone. I fell asleep at a reasonable hour. I started using an alarm clock in the early morning. I ate my breakfast with black coffee and a filter-less cigarette.

In Rightful Solitude

October 26, 2026 Essays, Issue 32, Issue 32 Essays

By ANDREW STEINER

It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait.

Lazy River

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By KERRY JAMES EVANS

—after “My Husband and I Fight about Robots” by Sara Burge

Mother’s on her way back from the Fayette waterpark,
where the kids don’t know how to be lazy in the lazy river.
Mother’s trying to float in her tube,
and they’re knocking into me like we’re bumper cars.
In the background, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”

Thank You for Your Attention to This Matter: Nonnamaxxing

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By TINA CANE

Today’s lively experiment was supposed to be about the virtues of olive oil

and the simple yet sumptuous lifestyle of Italian nonnas maximizing their wellness

by just being themselves but no sooner had I embraced the integrity of handmade

bucatini and a schmatta than did my mind migrate towards questions about the source

of self-regard and whether there really are any self-evident truths

I was in my car

Good Little Fox

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By KAROLINA LETUNOVA

It’s minus forty outside, and on Baba Lena’s glassed-in balcony the towels have dried stiff and I stand them up on the couch like snow cranes flying north and breathe in their frozen freshness. On a warm winter day of minus twenty Celsius, we could go buy ice cream. Rita wanted to come to Baba Lena’s too, but she is in the hospital. When we have a cold, mama makes us breathe hot steam from boiled potatoes, but Rita leaned too close and scalded her throat and her voice is gone and it hurts so much she can’t even swallow.

I would happily trade places with her if I could have Aleksey as my best friend.

The Next Day

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By PETER FILKINS

bird song laced the particulate air
wind emptied the pines of their whistle
a cloud roamed aimless arriving somewhere
the creek lapped away at its trestles

King Cake for Epiphany Available This Weekend

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By NATALIE BAVAR

I don’t know what this means.
It’s just before 8, and my darling
cat pounced behind the recycling mound

and emerged with a mouse. She carried
it up to my room to begin her dirty work,
the quest to kill without wounding,

Newfoundland

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By CAMPBELL MCGRATH

We wanted to say goodbye to the world we knew
so we drove the coastline north from Miami
as far as we could go. It was a farewell tour,
sure, but farewell to what? Not the ocean,
looming daily out the right-hand window,
not the water but what the water would erase.
Farewell to Florida, nipped in the bud, cheeky
and self-satisfied as a sun-worshipping infant—
goodbye, little baby Florida, goodbye!
Goodbye to Ocracoke and old Saint Simon,
Virginia Beach and Fire Island, goodbye
to all those literal-minded municipalities—
Surf and Ocean and Atlantic Cities—tossed up
like flotsam along that waterlogged littoral.
Six weeks and thousands of meandering miles later
we found ourselves at a picnic table outside
the Chowder Hut in Meat Cove, Nova Scotia,
where the final stretch of tire-rutted gravel
gives up the ghost: end of the road, folks.

dolphins, the mycale strait

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By KAS BERNAYS

her voice crackled like a distress signal
interrupted as she told me
how in the bright haze
halfway between borders
and their certainties
the engine’s faltering stutter
had drowned under her daughters’ wails
and all desperation had coiled
into the kick of her unborn son

Jenga

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By DIANE MEHTA

You can’t risk too much Jenga in a lift
but when you leave her, put your foot down,
exit to the steady earth we merely balance on—
you risk collapse, your knife-edge youth
retracts while you are full of spirit and mistakes.

I Stopped Dreaming

In Rightful Solitude

Lazy River

Thank You for Your Attention to This Matter: Nonnamaxxing

Good Little Fox

The Next Day

King Cake for Epiphany Available This Weekend

Newfoundland

dolphins, the mycale strait

Jenga

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