The dog is crossing a circle. Dawn light catching silver strands on a gray coat, saliva on a panting tongue, a red collar. A lost dog.
For an instant, we lock eyes, then I continue around and take the north exit. I’m in a hurry to get to the meet-up point. My first time running with others and I’m dreading it, but doctor’s orders and all that. Besides, I’ve promised my husband. I will be late, I will be late, I will be late, I say through my teeth, then pull over to look for the dog.
Despite the brief streaks of self-
belief, a stubborn defeat pervades.
Absent a job, absent a title.
I want to declare: a great undoing has taken place.
And I don’t know where to search for the bricks
that once made up the house of who I used to be.
![In Place of River I’ll Use [God]](https://www.thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ezza-Ahmed.jpg)
By EZZA AHMED
Ten days behind my tongue
summer in the diasporic,
riding thick in the smell of [God]
and fresh cloves.
By [God] I mean the monsoon season
where water appeared in snake-like streams
erasing all traces of my
present tense.
By EMILY NEMENS
She was running along the Manhattan side of the East River—this was in the bucolic “before” times, prior to when the city tore up the East Village’s riverside park, chucking its eighty-year-old trees and modernist amphitheater and ebullient perennial flower beds in the name of future flood mitigation—when she felt a curtain being snapped up the back of her left calf, krrrrrik! More lightning than pain. At first. Then, it became very painful. A hot pain that ran an invisible line down the meat of her calf, like those sexy stockings with seams, but the seams had turned carnivorous and were nibbling at her flesh with tiny razor teeth. Running farther, even slow-jogging the 1.3 miles home, was out of the question (her mental math: more pain multiplied by less time in transit, or less pain times more minutes; the latter had the lower sum), so she slowly limped back from the river, putting as little weight on her left foot as possible. She wondered what she would do.
By EZZA AMHED
Because I didn’t say Mashallah when she swapped her nose stud for a hoop and two days later I’m met by the bursting bulb of blood and pus which seals the fibrous innards of her nose cartilage on the outside sits the bulb pulsing expanding as if it’s breathing looks like a red evil eye ornament white pupil right at the center she has a nose growing out of her nose
Dead Man’s Association meets every Wednesday evening at Padiyappa’s Tea Stall & Smoke Shop. I am the president and the primary focus of the club. There is only one table at Padiyappa’s, but at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, no local would dare take my spot. It’s been this way for the past fifteen years. The tea stall boy, a new chap, hands us stainless steel tumblers of piping hot tea and then hangs around to stare at me.
“Po da,” I say to him, eyeing his hairless chest, visible because his top two buttons are not fastened. “This is not a circus. Let me be.”
By RACHEL HADAS
The old woman with the art
paces through her silent rooms,
sunlight reflecting off the frames.
Adult children live downstairs
in the basement. Whose is the art?
Is it the world’s or hers or theirs?
Reggie pulled his truck up the driveway and past the old goat pasture, a field of knee-high brome that now fed only a rusted tractor, not a buck or a nanny in sight. The only good thing about his wife’s death all those years ago—he could finally let go of the shaggy herd she had loved so much, fill the freezer, and focus on the more agreeable ruminants.
Reggie killed the ignition next to the house. One coal-colored cloud floated like a top hat above his yellow lopsided rancher. Past that, the afternoon sun painted the foothills a fiery mauve. In the distance a trio of bluffs gave way to an abstract canvas, just cattle and rust-red desert smudging south to New Mexico and on into the Navajo Nation.
By L. S. KLATT
I leave the house unlocked & walk to the garage jacked to
The White Stripes. My mouth is a guitar; snow is in the sound hole.
Spring. I think it’s spring. The automatic door leaps
in its tracks & is music again. I record on my phone a soundwave
as the GTO convertible wheels out of its tomb, the driveway
chartreuse with maple wings. Tell White I’ll cut some garlic
By DANIEL TOBIN
Like a dog truant among the tended plots
it turns back toward us a considerate eye
as though sensing the disquiet of our being
lost here among all the unfamiliar graves
that would be landmarks proving the right way
if this were the way we’d believed it to be.
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