I do my finest listening in the dark.
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.
One of the marvels of my life—
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade
from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
Here’s more dark: sometimes birds sleep
tucked under a giraffe’s dusky armpit
![[Freedom Song]](https://www.thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/6780574655_9e0b767324_b.jpg)
what does it mean, to be free? i sip coke at my phuppos, azaadi
on the walls of the university, free kashmir sprawled, azaadi
on my body. when i walk the streets of lahore men stare.
can i write the poem that makes me free, that brings azaadi
to my lips? i say i want to drink from its waters, but i know
what it means to be human & dumb, to pray & when azaadi
comes to shun, to judge & say not like this. control, a bitch
deeply un-free, that sticks me in my own mind, azaadi
The miracle of the chain:
here, you could be anywhere
and still find the same winter tomatoes
(Greece, California, Spain),
Dream 1: In which he annoys her
It was New Year’s Eve when he showed up,
in the sleety weather, in his old flannels,
to knock on our door again. You’re back!
my wife cried. I missed you! He laughed,
and as they hugged he lifted her gently
into the air—that’s when she remembered
he was dead. She stopped crying, annoyed
at his ruse, annoyed that this was the day,
of all days, when the ruses of our dead
would be exposed. Still, for a full minute—
after waking but before opening her eyes—
she let him keep holding her in the air.
His left wrist dangled out the half-wound-down glass of a boxy brown Cadillac with red felt seats. Flies drifted in and out. He had a dip top cone in his hand. The place was famous for them. You’d think it would be melting in the heat, but the molten chocolate shell held the ice cream within firm and cold. The air reeked of gasoline. No one had thought to turn the engine off.
Our hour at the clinic, test
results and what the doctor guessed.
Then the bright intensity
out on Industrial Boulevard,
the late October sun so hard
and air so crisp that everything
felt close and brash and nearly stung.
By RU FREEMAN
Eudora writes to William about roses
Mr. Hennessey’s Gloire Dijon
Beauty of Glazenwood found
on the sides of barns its yellow
flaked with red caught only
from the windows of passing trains
they didn’t find us beautiful. The haters
let our skin slip, slowly, from our bones,
satiated our thirst with sludge and brine water,
led us to wrathful prayers offered in caves.
I’ve learned that a small amount of painkill
blooms into a heartbreak, just as the moon
sinks in the ocean, smears and dissolves,
depleted by the longest of hopeful nights.
The sign painted on the truck is a phrase
I contemplate under a vine-covered pergola.
You might call this walled city garden
my hermitage—the faint notes
of a live flute from an open window
harmonizing with a robin’s song.
Sirens break my reverie.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.