Translated by DON SHARE
Everything is filled with you,
and everything is filled with me:
the towns are full,
just as the cemeteries are full
of you, all the houses
are full of me, all the bodies.
Don Share published three poems, including “Wishbone,” the title poem of his newest collection, in the first issue of The Common. He’s been on a roll ever since, publishing five books as author, translator, or editor in the last year and a half. Here are a few selections from and links to those volumes:
Artist: RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
Curated by JULIA COOKE
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Open Air, Relational Architecture”, 2012. Commissioned by the Association for Public Art, Philad
Twenty-four searchlights, all high-powered, were set on rooftops around Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway last September and October. They were programmed, however, to avoid shining their spotlights on any physical objects: no buildings, no naked windows, no trees. Instead, they glimmered straight up into the sky: twenty-four columns of light responding — here solid, there faint, twitching and beating and sweeping across the sky together, then separating — to the voices of Philadelphia residents.
By NORMAN LOCK
Fluent in the languages of unnatural death, Luis Boscán set down on thick paper the confessions of the Spanish damned while, outside the cruel chamber furnished ingeniously with instruments of torment, the fountains of Seville produced liquid acanthus leaves to the sound of castanets.
June 17, Barcelona
Burgers Recollected
After the sad burger I had on our layover in Brussels, I vow never to eat so poorly again, at least not while in the European Union. As my girlfriend Ashley and I touchdown in Catalonian country, a craving comes over me that only meat of the reddest proportions, fish of the freshest means, and cuisine of the finest and oldest preparation can fill. Waiting at baggage claim can be so torturous after a long journey, but there I recall that most excellent bite of food from my last trip to Barcelona. The stand out. The thing that made me come back. The McFoie. It was at Carles Abellan’s restaurant, Tapas 24. A “foie gras burger” of veal sirloin and foie gras constructed to look like a McDonald’s hamburger, a touch of home for any American who grew up on the flat beef patty, two pickles, and dallop of ketchup. The McFoie came rare and juicy, and with an artisan’s touch, too rich to be eaten too often, but with flavor so profound that I found myself dreaming of it as my baggage arrived and my girlfriend’s did not.
I already know Gaudi’s phantasmagoria: the commissioned houses that curve like ocean waves or flash in the sun as though they were covered in fish scales, the Art Deco-Gothic cathedral spires that replicate eternity via never-ending construction, the public park that simulates an underwater landscape. I already know the urban legend that Walt Disney, after spending time here as a young man, would forever replicate the fanciful stone gargoyles, arches and spires of the Barri Gotic in his cartoon worlds, and in the Fantasyland of his first theme park in California.
The ants have returned to Carrer Hort. We thought we’d eliminated them, crushing them under the flat rubbery green kitchen sponge in a flurry of destruction. They’re small, these Spanish Mediterranean ants, but they’re tougher than they look, and after five days’ absence during unrelenting rain they’ve returned, arriving from some unknown and undiscoverable place to scurry frantically around the kitchen sink.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.