Here at The Common we think a lot about “place,” but that’s not quite the same as thinking about where you’re from, something Sonya Chung recently mulled over in her column for “In House.” I find myself thinking about that topic pretty often, ever since moving to Western Massachusetts for graduate school two years ago. Growing up in New Jersey, twenty-five miles outside of Manhattan, New York City cast a long shadow. “The city” was as much a part of my identity as summer trips down the shore. My father, along with a majority of people in my town, commuted to work in the city every day. He would come home with his coat smelling distinctly like an NJ Transit train car: part newsprint, part stale air.
The Archivist
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
The past clicks us into focus.
There’s a slid-hinge to the edit.
In this photo, your father frames you
like a fish he wants to remember—
slipped and tin, temporarily pliable,
propped on his knee.
The Way Birds Stand
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
Why are you so sad, Girl, the fishermen ask.
As a colander drains, as shoes to feet,
as he who smokes will invariably say yes to coffee,
so a girl watching a group of gulls must be a soul in torment
or lack company, or maybe a rod,
the technology to stave off loneliness.
A Perfect Love
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
You are a tortoise in a hard hat.
I am a heart growing gallons and gallons of hair.
You made it with me: a perfect love,
which went hard from the softness of its innards.
And though all the love went elsewhere, you hung around,
like a gas, like sand in my bikini pants.
Katharine Kilalea is the author of One Eye’d Leigh, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writeers under 30.
Mandela at 91
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
By VONANI BILA
Old, frail & with an unsteady gait
charlatans drag you to an election rally
somewhere in a stadium in port elizabeth
somewhere in a stadium in johannesburg
Next Year I Want to Run the Comrades Marathon
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
By VONANI BILA
(after discovering that I weigh 90 kilograms before the age of 40)
chubbiness is weighing me down
like a tree that can’t carry its branches anymore
i don’t want to be brushed aside
so easily by the wind of love
like rugged absentminded sweating men
with bellies of pap, tripe & beer
Alive
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
from Invisible Earthquake
27th May, 00h44
I write to keep you alive.
I write to resist killing myself
In little do-able ways,
Lose days, dreaming of reunion with you.
V. A. Haunted
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
from Requiem for This House
the father will definitely be burnt
the mother too, will be burnt
the little boys are then, already burnt
Volcanic
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
By FIONA ZERBST
Risk and aftershock,
this love
that leaps desire.
Remembering S-21, Cambodia
October 1, 2012
Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry
By FIONA ZERBST
—for Vann Nath
I.
This was a school
before it was wire and silence.
Oleander
scented the sunlit courtyard.
