It’s only 6 a.m. and already my sun
salutation is ten minutes behind
mountain standard time just means more
All the small griefs, the petty slights, the imagined
worst things, he’s placed them each
Pin prick of pink in the solution to ensure you struck a vein,
before you push the plunger in. Brief burn then spreading
By JOHN POCH
Our bus downshifts cresting a hill,
and a partridge covey flushes into
the lit mist of the autumn noon, clouds
spilling over higher hills slow and white
like soft glaciers cut by massive stones
the size of fortresses, and just as cold.
Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES
Harvard Professor Emeritus,
thank you for coming to my reading,
though you had so many other attractions to choose from,
upstairs Šalamun was speaking, Pamuk two doors down.
Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES
A night train glides like a bobsleigh down the gutter of winter,
down a valley wreathed in the amber glow of sleep,
a nameless little town, where I first
Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONE
Down a long corridor walks the surgeon, he’s just
finished operating on my father. He’s walked
“And we went on living it, like a wave, that doesn’t know
it is at every moment different water.”
—Alan Williamson, from “A Childhood Around 1950”
In 1967 I almost drowned when I wandered from a sandbar and dropped into a deep cleft. That particular summer on the Jersey Shore, my older sisters had taken to riding what seemed to be kind, propellant waves with the rafts our mother had rented near the boardwalk, the industrial canvas sort you couldn’t buy in a store. I wasn’t a confident swimmer yet, so my mother wouldn’t even let me near one, which made no sense; the rafts were oversized life preservers, after all.
By ILAN STAVANS
There is one story that has always held a strange allure for me. It appears in Genesis 25:19 to 28:9 and is about Jacob’s theft of Esau’s birthright. Every time I read it, I feel haunted. In old age, a blind Isaac asks Esau, his oldest son, to visit him. He makes it understood that the end is near and asks Esau to gather food from the field and bring it back so he might be able to bless him.
By SARAH SMARSH
It was unlikely that Betty and Jeannie would end up in the country. They’d always moved within cities—Wichita, Chicago, Denver, Dallas—and neighboring small towns. And it was unlikely they’d stay for long. They first hit the road when Betty was a teenager and Jeannie a baby, and by the time Jeannie was in high school they’d changed addresses forty-eight times. In the late 1970s, though, they landed for a good while on a Kansas farm.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.