Photograph of an old, gray-brown house sitting near the shore

Translation: Side Entrance to the House

AMAL AL SAEEDI
It always felt as though I was on the cusp of betraying some kind of covenant if I acted out of my own free will. Like someone who drives an expensive car, but doesn’t own it, and is worried about embarrassing themselves if they get into an accident—ignoring the fact that this accident would put their life in danger.

Close-up images of cardboard boxes.

More to the Story

MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS
Any story—any history, for that matter—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.

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

G. C. WALDREP
I am listening to the slickened sound of the new / wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness. / It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks. / Mural of the natural, a complicity epic. / The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear— / Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage, / a friction of consequence.

Abbie Kiefer and Theresa Monteiro.

Churning Up Mystery: A Conversation between Theresa Monteiro and Abbie Kiefer

ABBIE KIEFER
Grief can feel like a low hum or a fog—always there, always making you aware of its presence, but in a way that doesn’t require you to examine it. I knew, that if I wanted to write meaningfully about loss, I’d have to think closely about its distinctive shape. What particular qualities made a shuttered mill so affecting to me?

Purple flowers & arboretums in in Daisy State Park

Three Poems from Arkansas

SANDY LONGHORN
You are standing in an Ozark oasis, / the park interpreter tells our tiny group / of three strangers. We have walked / twenty yards onto the Ozark Highland Trail

What We’re Reading: November 2024

CARSON WOLFE
Exposition Ladies composes a love letter to the poorly scribbled female characters of Hollywood who exist solely to move the plot along. Each poem takes on the persona of one of these unformed vessels, often beginning with ‘I am the exposition lady’. Reminiscent of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, Exposition Ladies is a perfect example of how a book can contain a singular idea and expand outward.

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 »

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