The Shirt

DAVID RYAN
He'd forgotten this shirt for many years, just another drifting article of faith, as the smaller artifacts of the last couple of decades have been subsumed, lost beneath the greater accrual of a pain fused to the loneliness, the unbearable gathering of what Jonathan sees as Now in light of Then.

Close-up images of cardboard boxes.

More to the Story

MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS
Any story...is a series of inclusions and omissions, a series of truths and deceptions. The story Grandma Betty liked to tell about her life was not dissimilar to the one Grandma Guta and Grandpa Abe told about theirs. A story of hard work and progress, another version of the American Dream.

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

NATHANIEL PERRY
Words can contain their opposite, / pleasure at once a freedom and a ploy— / a garden something bound and original / where anything, but certain things, should thrive; / the difference between loving-kindness and loving / like the vowel shift from olive to alive.

Caroline M. Mar Headshot

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

CAROLINE M. MAR
That's a reconciliation that I'm often grappling with, which is about positionality. What am I responsible for? What's coming up for me; who am I in all of this? How can I be my authentic self and also how do I maybe take some responsibility?

Green Fields and Clear Blue Sky

Dispatch from Moscow

AFTON MONTGOMERY
The forestry scientists said Moscow has some of the unhappiest trees in the world. I remember clearly my friend telling me this, though I don’t remember much about her explanation of why. It’s possible she said unhealthiest rather than unhappiest and my brain overwrote her telling with my own truth.

Using The Common in my first-year seminars has been fun, fruitful, and helpfully startling for these classes.”

—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »

Home