The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter
hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room”
where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.
Please welcome back TC contributors Elizabeth Hazen, Jonathan Moody, Daniel Tobin, and Honor Moore (whose poem “Song,” published in the first issue of The Common, was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2012). We’re also delighted to welcome Gerard Coletta, who is making his first appearance in The Common.
Pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves suggests that Neanderthals, too, buried flowers with their dead.
The pollen could be mere coincidence—
traces left by a prehistoric rat
that ate flowers near the grave—but we prefer
Celebrate the advent of spring with new poems by seven of our spectacular contributors.
This month we are featuring eight new poems by four The Common contributors:
By ELIZABETH HAZEN
Mountains rise beyond the Laundromat
like ochre waves about to crash; our father,
armed with tools and pack, tracks the rocks
without a map. Here, the Laundromat is all
in a strip of vacancies; for miles, nothing
but dirt, dust, outcrop, sky. Our mother gives
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