My horse was called Emmy, short for Emerald Star. Dad’s more mature, larger mount was named Sassafras, which he shortened to Sassy. If we hadn’t taken these girls home, they’d have been shipped to the glue factory.
By ELSA LYONS
Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.
Donbas Days
this is not the fault of the people but it is
the people’s problem
a lack of nerve
a chance to make a little meat
and unemployment like a flood
Teju Cole at LitFest 2025
For TEJU COLE, prose, poetry, and photography tug against and bleed into one another. At the tenth anniversary of Amherst College’s LitFest, on March 1, 2025, Cole spoke with The Common’s Editor in Chief JENNIFER ACKER about his novel Tremor, his approach to genre-bending, and the role of writers and photographers in bearing witness to catastrophe.
November 6th, 2024
I wake in the night, check the news. Watch you
turn in your sleep, rest your cheek on my chest.
How everything and also this: the heat of your skin,
hand wrapping my waist, the off-beat of our breaths
finding rhythm in the dark.
In the kitchen, I cry to the sound of my mother’s sobs.
Count the injections I have left before the vials run out.
There is no point in asking how, in asking why. Empire
does not answer questions. Genocide does not answer
questions—the answers were right there.
At the train station, the man next to me cries,
turns his face to meet my own. Somehow, the sun
is shining. A dog barks. Someone laughs. Everything
fragments. A mother & daughter step up to the tracks,
squeeze each other’s hands.
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, nonbinary writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of Western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places.
They walk to the ocean, talk about all the relationships
that have fallen apart around them.
So many women they know pursued love
and risked their chance for children.
The sound her hand makes against his sleeve
is the sound of palm trees.
Indifference is far more efficient
than fission or fusion
as a weapon of mass destruction,
and far less problematic
than uranium or tritium
to procure, occurring,
as it does, massively in nature.
My dad could be tough and distant
and push a little too hard into what hurt
but if God pulled that Isaac shit on him,
saying “I want you to sacrifice your son
for me” it never would have got as far
as me strapped to some Moriah altar.
If I was nearby, he’d tell me to go inside.
Then, he’d resign, curtly quit, from God,
flick a Lucky at the old man’s feet, and
walk away. Later, I know he’d joke,
“That fucking guy? He couldn’t spell God
if you spotted him the G and the D,”
making me laugh even if behind his eyes
he was making peace with perdition.
Matt W. Miller is a poet, essayist, teacher, and author of Tender the River, The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus (winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry), and Cameo Diner. A former Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.
By CORY BEIZER
Before my mother can return to her life and stop watching me eat, she says she must give me a dog. She swears a companion is the only way she’ll feel safe leaving me alone. It makes no sense. How can I take care of a dog if I am failing to take care of myself? She says that’s the point, to learn how to care, and if the dog dies, well, then she’ll know when to come back. I tell her no. My beloved cow figurine is companion enough. Its thick apotropaic horns will fend off the evil that is sure to return.
By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
Kol Nidre
And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.
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