New work from our contributors: MARK KYUNGSOO BIAS, SARA MUNJACK, and DANIEL TOBIN
Table of Contents:
Mark Kyungsoo Bias | Visitor
| Meeting My Mother
Sara Munjack | Friendship Talk after Love-lives
Daniel Tobin | The Door
| Prayer in Passing
By DANIEL TOBIN
For Bella Bond
Slowly as soundlessly in its unknowing,
what the driven thing must hunger for
is love’s white noise—a latent faring
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.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Daniel Tobin and R. A. Villanueva discuss their poems “The Origamist” and “Pareidolia.”
By DANIEL TOBIN
The Cat’s Eye Nebula—one could begin
there as a way of showing how being
folds in upon itself, always to form
new configurations. That’s where we’re from,
By DANIEL TOBIN
Translated loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet
discovered among the ruins of Kush.
God of the first waters, Ea, listen,
You who parsed chaos with a net from the day:
Unfasten your knots, let the swells replenish
From subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh.
The galaxies circuit in their bright delay.
The least wind tempts me with what might have been.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Despite having no lungs and unable to breathe, the second
head displays signs of independent consciousness….
The first fiction is
I’m talking to you at all,
the more amorphous
of my own Janus head, the god
alive and compassing
what has gone and what
is coming, though
which is which is
hard to say. Did I say
my own? I meant ours, my
sister twin, the comelier
By DANIEL TOBIN
It could be on a card, tucked away somewhere buried
In a drawer under tools, the keys to doors
Left long behind, folded like a phone number
Into the black book of forgotten friends—the name
