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.
By SHARON DOLIN
—after Rilke
Yours, still the hardest face to see—
even the mirror lies, with your image
in reverse. To see into your life
you must look into the life of things:
take this brass candelabra shaped
into a circular set of stairs that,
when lit, sees into you, seizes
hold of your brokenness and
shows you all growth starts
with a wound. Think of the earth
in spring, split open by green shoots.
By JOHN POCH
I try to wish the best for him, our rival. His lines which really amount to nothing, the phrases that his readers fawn over, “I’m here for it” or “What a time” or even single words he uses as lines like “Fair” or “Same” or “Cheers”… I shouldn’t let them get to me. He even rhymes Halloween/Thirteen in a sonnet called “Hell.” People have come to treasure the expected, lavishing praise on the nice and cute, but that is not poetry. Is there something else to it, or is it just a minor cult of personality, the same way cheerleaders are chosen? Those readers who believe in him are the ones who don’t believe in absolute truths so allow fiction in their nonfiction willy-nilly. Gossips, they know little poetry or even of poetry. They fancy themselves naturalists and italicize it. They are educators rather than teachers.
I gotta buy a cake for my kid.
Some kind of ice cream jamboree from J.P. Licks down in West Roxbury.
She’s gonna be 20.
When you are a parent, you just keep buying cakes for your kids.
You could be 80 and she’s 60
and still you head on out to Carvel in New Rochelle, Webster Avenue,
and get her the Fudgie the Whale 12-inch
even if you have diabetes and two busted kneecaps.
1910
Ida Smith lived on a large farm near the south shore of Lake Erie, a lake she believed was the ocean when she was very young, because the shore was sand and all she could see was water and water and she didn’t yet know the sea smelled like salt.
Gustavo’s cinder block bungalow has no windows, so he’s surprised when he steps out at half past dawn to find a man in an olive uniform digging post holes for a semi-assembled fence scattered in the dusty yard. The soldier stands, puffs his chest, and dusts off his brass buttons. He is young, tall, and handsome—some proud mother’s son. Gustavo is old, bent, and ugly as the day he was born.
By RIMA BRUSI
Translated from the Spanish by JESSICA POWELL
Excerpted from Phantoms
In January 1970, two months before my conception, John Lennon and Yoko Ono shaved their heads, and a few weeks later they released the single “Instant Karma!”
If this thing I’m writing were a script, my parents’ acid-filled days on New York’s Lower East Side would be accompanied by this song. This is what I’m thinking about today as I talk to my mother, Teté, on the phone. This is mainly how we communicate: in-person visits rarely go well for us. In fact, our life together has always been more or less a disaster. We maintain our relationship, what remains of it, with the help of the telephone and letters.
We had a quarrel, melee, detonation of hurt—
fisticuffs of invisible disfiguration in the countryside of Spain.
I slept that evening on a reclining lawn chair under the stadium of the sky.
You stayed in the bed, roof overhead. The next morning you left
in an economy red rental car for the village where you joined
a Catholic procession, walked amongst men carrying a wooden saint
above their heads down narrow cobblestoned streets and alleyways.
By ELVIS BEGO
Brunch nearly over, talk getting punctuated by lulls, her mother, trim and elegant in her pastel widowhood, letting father go so easily, it seems to Josephine, now asks her if she is thinking about a child.
“No,” comes the answer, but too quick, too reflexive. It’s too late to take it back, but she makes the attempt anyway, and says, “Well, it occurs to me now and then, but Ismar, you know….” She doesn’t finish the sentence, and her mother knows to look away to give her time to change the subject, which she doesn’t. Instead she says, “I will, of course, have to think about it, if it is ever to happen.”
my Grammy taught me right
from conception, her voice
iron & honey in my bones
endless like the alto line
of a Zion Convection Choir
full & bodied, darker than
than the mouth of the sea
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.