Postpartum

By ERICA EHRENBERG

To have a blind spot
there must be
a surrounding clarity.
Being a mother
brings me the world
I have already
blindly traveled.
Now being home
is a kind of homesickness
and the old chairs
look like relics
from a fire. Children
clear rooms
and open windows
as if they had been leading you
this whole time,
from life to life.

Erica Ehrenberg‘s work has appeared in journals and anthologies including The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and The New Republic. She is currently training to become a psychoanalyst.

[Purchase Issue 25 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Postpartum

Related Posts

March 2026 Poetry Feature: Welcome Back Peter Filkins

PETER FILKINS
pissarro is dead cézanne too / swept away like willowed flotsam / that brute degas gone as well / chafing tides the sea of years // long ago battles fought discarded / ballast tossed from fame’s balloon / rising like heat and the unheard prices / feeding straw to the fires of need // for more garden cuttings variants

Two Poems by Heather Bourbeau

This forest is named for the first head of the National Forest Service, who warned of assuming natural resources were inexhaustible, who said without conservation we pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure, who asked if these resources were for the benefit of us all or for the use and profit of a few? He was also a leading eugenicist.

February 2026 Poetry Feature: Fatimah Asghar and Shane Moran

FATIMAH ASGHAR
i cursed the frog / that found its way into / my house. murderous, i laid / poison for the ants. i threw / my moon in the trash. / when he cheated, i wished / him a hall of mirrors. / doomed to endless versions / of him. i prayed they’d undo / each other. & they did. i took / from the earth without permission."