Poetry | Page 3 | The Common

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

November 11, 2024 Interviews

RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.

Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?

Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

October 31, 2024 Poetry

New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.

Table of Contents:

- Nathaniel Perry, “34 (Song, with Young Lions)” and “36 (Song, with Contranym)”
- Tyler Kline, “Romance Study” and “What if I told you”

34 (Song, with Young Lions)
By Nathaniel Perry

All the young lions do lack

bones. They lie wasted on grass,

cashed out, exhausted and un-

delivered. A poor man cries

eventually. A troubled

friend cries eventually.

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)

October 21, 2024 Audio, Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

The Common Magazine · Real Estate for the Blended Family by Elizabeth Hazen

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.

Dolors Miquel: Poems

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By DOLORS MIQUEL
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN

Sparrowhearts

The women of my family family
hunted hunted birds, sparrows, birds, sparrows, and they made them sing
sing day in day out day in day out day in as the pots boiled, inner courtyards
wide open,
washtubs soaked old naked motheaten watery
unrinsed firstwashed clothes
and the windows opened, gave birth, opened
so beauty would regale them with songs and flowers and flowers and songs,
buzzing, zigzagging, chirping, whispering,
not understanding that they understood nothing. Nothing at all.

Wedding Vows

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By WYATT TOWNLEY

Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.

Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,

the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.

From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was

hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running

is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug

out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall

for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.

Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com

[Purchase Issue 28 here.]

Solitude

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ADRIENNE SU

I had had my fill,
but I kept devoting more
days, then weeks to it,

buying books, making
no plans, as if empty slots
would well up with rain,

pushing anyone
who might edge into my space
away as if by

natural forces.
I never pledged anything
permanent to it,

A Day Revisited

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ROBERT CORDING

I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.

Dominus

October 21, 2024 Audio, Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ANGIE MACRI

Danger, as in strangers, men or women;
as in twisters at night when you couldn’t
see them coming; as in the machines
that made work so easy you forgot
to watch what you were doing,

Akoloute (Sequi Me)

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ELIZABETH L. HODGES

Tracing dusty footprints, you can be led
to fornix, to tombs, the circus and bars,
to my lupan, my cell, my earthen bed;
what waits is not secret—see what I are?
I’m not a barmaid, an actor or slave;
I’m not being cursed because I had sinned—
I’m earning my keep in this grisly trade.
For that I am traif, but come along in.
I’ll lead you to places you’ve never had;
to hell in a basket: one bloody as.

Zoraida Burgos: Poems

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ZORAIDA BURGOS
Translated by PETER BUSH

OUR VERY OWN EQUILIBRIUM
Wearily, but firmly, we twisted
our feeble trunks
around a stump
alone but not sad amid other trees,
entangled roots
clinging till the last
to our rough stony ground.
We grow two shoots
bringing hope to our landscape
when a ruddy wing on the bare
mountain horizon
heralds a threatening wind downstream.
Thoughtfully, carefully,
we’ve been turning our mud,
our clay, bare-fingered,
with the strength of truth,
of harsh truth dead reborn,
our hands tightly clasped.
And nothing, no wind, no clouds, no rain, no threats
will shake
the stump, clay or mud, and these shoots,
for wearily,
but firmly,
we’ve made them our own.

All posts tagged: Poetry

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)

Dolors Miquel: Poems

Wedding Vows

Solitude

A Day Revisited

Dominus

Akoloute (Sequi Me)

Zoraida Burgos: Poems

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