News & Events | Page 268 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

May 27, 2013 Essays, In House

We painted lipstick on our lips and watched businessmen in suits flip open Die Welt, grazing the top of the newspaper with their line of sight, conspicuously shy in their observations of two foreign frauen. The train shot into Berlin’s Hauptbanhof with succinct precision, confirming one of our German stereotypes: 7.00pm exactly on Dec 31^st, 2003, and not a minute late. My friend and I hoisted backpacks and flowed out of the central station and into a city that was eagerly, furiously rebuilding, was humming with energy, and was dusty and heterogeneous and still could not quite figure out how to contain itself. 2004 seemed like an inauspicious year to welcome.

Everything is Filled with You

May 24, 2013 Poetry, Translation

by MIGUEL HERNANDEZ

Translated by DON SHARE

Everything is filled with you,

and everything is filled with me:

the towns are full,

just as the cemeteries are full

of you, all the houses

are full of me, all the bodies.

Morgualos

May 24, 2013 Poetry, Translation

By DARÍO JARAMILLO AGUDELO

Translated by DON SHARE

Morgualos love chimneys, white cotton shirts, the agapanthus, a tree called the seven-skin, the scent of fresh cilantro as it falls into soup, the sound of church bells, and days without clouds.

May 2013 Poetry Feature

May 24, 2013 Poetry, Translation

Don Share published three poems, including “Wishbone,” the title poem of his newest collection, in the first issue of The Common. He’s been on a roll ever since, publishing five books as author, translator, or editor in the last year and a half. Here are a few selections from and links to those volumes:

Tailwind

May 22, 2013 Dispatches

By KAITLIN SOLIMINE

To get to Shanghai I take a Boeing 777 airplane to a Buick van to an Airbus 320 airplane to a Bombadier subway car to a Hyundai taxicab to a Shinkansen high-speed train to a Xiali taxi. This is China. This is a country in motion.

Review: Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club

May 20, 2013 Reviews

Book by BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ
Reviewed by GINA LUJAN BOUBION

If you stand in front of the Kentucky Club bar in Ciudad Juárez and look four blocks north, you see the U.S. and Mexican flags flapping on top of the Santa Fe Bridge to El Paso. Families with roots on both sides of the border once passed fluidly back and forth over that bridge to visit cousins, go to school, grab lunch, get a tooth pulled, or for a night on the town.

The drug wars and immigration crackdowns have radically curtailed that flow, though it’s still possible, albeit scarier, for Americans to pop into the Kentucky Club on the Mexican side for a drink and sit on the same barstools where Al Capone, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe once perched.

Journey to a Place I’ve Never Been

May 15, 2013 Dispatches

By KURT CASWELL

Bending to a high-power telescope trained on the moon at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, specifically the terminator line that is the far reach of the sun’s light at this phase—waning Gibbous moon—the contrast of light and dark makes visible the rims and floors of uncountable impact craters. My companion and I can see the crater walls, the striated lines of some long past moment of chaos, the crusted lip of the crater’s edge where the force of that energy lifted and curled into a rift of moon rocks. The sun’s light on the lunar surface is so mesmerizing along that line, so utterly beautiful, that coming away from the eyepiece, all you can see is moon.

Coastlines

May 14, 2013 Essays

By TEOW LIM GOH

The ocean encircles a lone peak.

Rough terrain surrounds this prison.

There are few birds flying over the cold hills.

The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a Chinese immigrant carved this poem on the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. It was unsigned, one of many.

Homage to a Failed Venture: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

May 13, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

If Washingtonians have a patron saint, it’s the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice, a famous defender of civil liberties, Douglas was a committed environmentalist, who wanted to be remembered for leaving the earth more beautiful.

In February, Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute dubbed the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area Number One in the U.S. for traffic. Local drivers fritter away on average sixty-seven hours and thirty-two gallons of gasoline a year in traffic.

I was born in Washington and spent a good part of my childhood in the area. Though I haven’t lived there in years, each time I go “home,” I feel grateful to Justice Douglas for preventing my favorite Washington place, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, from becoming just another congested highway.