News & Events | Page 3 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Mermaid of Longnook

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

Carla wore a mask while trudging down the precipitous dune that shadowed Longnook Beach, her heaven on earth. She had brought from her city stash a colorful assortment of boldly patterned Mexican face coverings to make the necessity of protecting herself from airborne viral droplets less depressing. But bright flowers and butterflies, stout yellow ears of corn, and iconic unibrow Frida Kahlo faces made it no easier to breathe on the descent.

Most days, Carla used the shaft of her sheathed sun umbrella to steady herself while maneuvering over uneven ground. Today, Tom wasn’t there to help her carry her beach chair, so she had left the heavy umbrella at home. She wasn’t one of those old ladies who needed a cane, was she? A grinding creak from her arthritic left knee followed by an aching twinge and throb of pain from her right hip warned her that the uphill return would be a challenge.

A Small Price & Without Warning

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By MICHAEL ROBINS

The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions, that denouement when I too was a spinning child & my head tripped down its irreversible path into the solid corner of the piano bench. No signs of slowing down nor do I mention how, playing ghost & turning beneath the sheet, I felt like a cannonball, I felt like nothing else speeding through darkness & then through the fog near the rocky shore. Afterwards, I knew only gravity, my blood, the irrefutable bleeding.

On Their First Date

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By DIANA KEREN LEE

My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul.
Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts.
As fires burn halfway around the world.

A Contentious Legacy: Art from Soviet Ukraine

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Art, Studio, Ukraine Portfolio

From THE MEAD ART MUSEUM

More than thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent states that emerged from its territory continue to grapple with its legacies. In Ukraine, this struggle has unfolded amidst a political and cultural war waged by Russia. As Vladimir Putin’s regime weaponizes the shared Soviet past in its attempts to erase Ukraine’s nationhood, the Soviet legacy remains the subject of heated debate among Ukrainians. While some identify “Sovietness” with “Russianness” and seek to remove it from the national narrative, others attempt to reclaim their Soviet legacy, emphasizing the agency of Ukrainians who created it.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By ANNIE SCHUMACHER

I’ve never been content with less than
God. Visions

like interior castles:
a red and white blanket
over grass, broken
slabs of tile, folded denim
in a fishing boat, sand-gold
grains of rice, all the colors
that tint a bruise—

Castanets 84 | Being fond on praise

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Uncategorized

By ANNA MARIA HONG

for & after William Shakespeare

To your beached blessings, add this curse:
not making worse what glass makes
so clear but neither smoking the path
to your impaneled store, absconded
documents across your bathroom floor,
public security, national writ walled in
where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
glory and never break your bloated story,
without flourish, without wit,
everywhere the news grows: May you dwell
among cases evermore.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Anna Maria Hong’s books include Age of Glass and Fablesque and the novella H & G. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.

A Meeting on Waterways

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By MARC VINCENZ

It seems all the light of morning
has descended here where it’s usually dark

and frogs raise their heads in the bulrushes,
where the last sounds swarm among the oaks.

Death of a Hero (The Mosquito)

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation, Ukraine Portfolio

By VIKTOR NEBORAK
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN

The rusty hollows inside the old mosquito
reduce his soprano to dust. Down the pipe
of his fragile beak, the pumps are already weak.
And his blood flows through fossilized riverbeds.

His gas tanks empty, song silenced, not a drop
of compassion in him… Running on coal fumes,
the rusted engines deliver him to drill
one last buzz through the ears of the crowd.

A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons
on these civilians as on military echelons
and then been posthumously awarded

the highest orders! his name on honor lists!
banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks!
… if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Viktor Neborak is a poet, writer, literary scholar, and critic. He is also a founding member (along with Yuri Andrukhovych and Oleksandr Irvanets) of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group. His collection The Flying Head and Other Poems appeared in English translation in 2005.

John Hennessy’s most recent books are Exit Garden State, a collection of poems, and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych co-translated with Ostap Kin.

Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. With John Hennessy, he translated Set Change by Yuri Andrukhovych, and A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan.

Small Mariners

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By LAUREN CAMP

What is it like to be found? All these years on, I’ve never before been
to the edge of this rocky square state. I drive 41 through aura and wither
and slip into Golden then out to Stanley and right on 60.

Beside the road, dust chafes and three shapes of mountains.
Keen winds fold in and exasperate. The radio sputters its beats.
Assigned to be at a school as the sun has left its felicity

to lead young grades in how to find and trust a poem, but I can’t
see the entrance apart from the fences. I cede to another end
while the sky stays to its razoring blue. I am late. I reimagine late.

And then I am taken, finally, into the gym, late and flummoxed.
I swallow. Set my eyes on 122 tender children, much smaller
than never-ending. At this age they are all swish and unconquerable

hope. A stunned mic waits like a nest below the fluorescents
and I am pointed to use it, to woo the kids into words. I go up—
to the empty middle of the gymnasium, put my teeth to the mesh

and invent a direction. I discard what I intended and ask
these little lighthouses to beam their vibrant lights to the page.
Beam what no one has asked them to find before. Where have you been

lost? They listen for rules but I give none. They tremble
with their little power. Say many lives lead nowhere. Say they huddle
within this town. Its pious blue. Say the verdict of future is here where

hawks skirl and transport. The children’s worries
are the thinnest lessons. There are stories they are moving toward.
Was it chance they had almost all been lost in Wal-Mart in the wipe-out

fluorescence and worshipped wings: Seasonal, Sewing, Tires,
the skittering intersections? Aisles, they ask me
to spell—and they write it, elongating the letters. The energy increases.

They shine as they explain the town’s slickest business as the world
of gone children. At last and thank goodness, they are lit up.
Telling the waves of fear. The breath wet. Their words nervous,

their sinews redefining. Life goes in a blink.
They were all clenched back to parents.
Without embellishment, they were saved.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Lauren Camp is the author of eight books, including In Old Sky, which grew from her experience as astronomer in residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She received a Dorset Prize and was an Arab American Book Award finalist. Camp served as poet laureate of New Mexico from 2022 to 2025. Visit LaurenCamp.com.

The Sixteenth Brother

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By A. J. BERMUDEZ

The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.