The Common, Issue 25

A special portfolio of Arabic fiction from Kuwait, stories set in the USSR during perestroika and on the Texas-Mexico border, essays about romance during Ramadan, and the legacy of artist Marcel Duchamp, and poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Karen Chase, Robert Cording, Tina Cane, and Felice Belle.

The August Story
YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA If their history together hadn’t begun this way, / they both would have been left alone, each with their war. / August—hellish, the bathhouse filled with bodies. / She squeezes the familiar palm and comes to life again. / Everything that has happened and didn’t happen...
The Human Revealed Unto Himself
FAISAL ALHEBAINY The cold stings your skin as you walk out of the hotel. It’s your first visit to Europe. You’re with a cultured friend who knows these countries well and, most importantly, is an art enthusiast. He immediately suggests, with a friendly and zealous shake of the head...
A Child Playing Between Checkpoints
HOMOUD ALSHAIYJE We were happy children. Fear didn’t stop us from doing what we wanted whenever we wanted. The clock had no place in our daily lives, as long as we were armed by play and by the secret weapon of Allah y-saʿdak, that Iraqi phrase that we used as a password...
Civitella Library, Italian Section
DIANE MEHTA In the operatic corner in the library, / Italian dialects heckle one another— / whose language is honey / on the tongue and who has disjointed / heads off syllables on the pikes of the invaders— / “Ma ti, vècio parlar, rezìsti.” / (“But you, old idiom, resist,” Zanzotto says.)
Cures
KAREN CHASE Light falls on ramshackle paint, / blue wooden slats, taxi pink and green tint sky, / fans paddling the outside breeze inside, / as Key West light vanishes into the Gulf. // A pebbled field with Fort Taylor at one edge, / sea at the other, objects undone by waves, / the sea, one forceful foot.
Matryoshka in Odessa
DIANE THIEL When I started out, it was mostly about the adventure, / following Ivan and the firebird, heading into history / across the Black Sea, climbing the Odessa steps / through the resistance, following / Pushkin through the tangle of fairy tales // and into the catacombs...
Endless Enclosure and Passing Cloud
JASSIM AL-SHAMMARIE I feel the wall with my bare hands, the peeling paint, the cracks along its surface…. They’re just superficial and haven’t impacted the solid masonry. There’s no light coming through. The soaring, towering wall is solid; it is two lights and one darkness long.
Closure?
CHRISTOPHER SPAIDE Close your trap. Everyone you’ve ever lost lost / everything. Life’s closed. It’s not even close. At least // they aren’t distant. As if a stiff flick to existence // flung them unfetchably far to the shadiest suburbs / of substance, where no wintry entropy disturbs // the desktop’s mossy dust...
Milagro
RUBÉN DEGOLLADO Whatever you believe, know this: Teodoro Ramirez’s dog could see into the spirit world. Teddy, as he was called by everyone in barrio La Zavala, never shared this with anyone. Of course, the only people he could have shared this with would have been his co-workers or his tíos and tías...
Dear Customer
BASIMA AL-ENEZI Even not-happily-ever-after endings are preceded by a certain amount of speculation about what is to come. As a matter of course, all the important changes in organizational structure and relevant administrative decisions take place on the last Thursday of each month.
Colony
LUISA A. IGLORIA A public square in every town, monuments / whitened in patches by lime and bird droppings. / Streets and bridges named after those who came / in galleons. They banished to the outskirts // shamans and native priestesses...
Forecast
BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER I promised we’d never / bring him here. Behind black iron gates, / brick walls smothered with ivy. The three / of us. Watching fires of autumn. Sitting / at the edge of his bed. Our son, thirty-one. In / a place of his own.
Invited
SEAN BERNARD The city overwhelmed us. We’d moved to it from a smaller part of the country, fairly rural, though it’s true that even rural parts of the country had by that time much in common with urban centers. In our small town there was a Walmart...
A Pity
REBECCA FOUST The creature was flushed from the snow / & flung like a tiny, limp footbag / before I could catch up to cup it below / my hands. While they collared the dog, / the vole throbbed through my skin / like a heart I held.
The Half-Hearted City
BOTHAYNA AL-ESSA In those days, everyone had the right to have feelings. It was natural to feel things, and the right thing to do about your feelings was to make them known. Feelings were plenty, but broadly they were segregated into two groups: Love and Fear.
Near Murrell's Inlet
MORRI CREECH The flatteries of the surf conspire to make / a stammering innuendo in the reeds. / The sun, splintered by the spume’s refractions, / sinks toward the west where it will disappear / in a violet streak above the evening dunes, / like mind considering the defeat of mind.
Car Wash, Key Largo
RICARDO PAU-LLOSA The soapy drench is physics drawn to river / toward me, 15 feet away in my flimsy / chair. At first its body fans to deliver / brims to concrete sinks I had not glimpsed, / then narrows to speed unveiling dips and bellies, / then courses on to a hole with a remnant pool / anchored by…
Postpartum
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…
Madonna Litta
FRANCES RICHEY Oh, Mary! It must have been a revelation / to breastfeed your boy the will of God. / All I had to offer was the usual. For years / after my son was weaned, I still had milk. / The men I slept with loved it. Men can be / such babies when a stream shoots up /…
The Cicadas Are Really Loud
EUGENE GLORIA Would Rizal rather be in the belly of a whale / or have a whale in his belly. I ask Rizal / as if he were a river and he never blinks / or makes smacking sounds to register his disapproval.
Spa Days
KEETJE KUIPERS I drive through the yellow ribcage of maples / arching the road, past the butch woman I want / to be, raking leaves in her front yard, hair / slicked back at the sides. Yesterday, searching / the internet for winter tights, I found crotchless ones...
Moving Sale
ANDERS CARLSON-WEE Duluth, we said when a browser asked. / Omaha, we said to another. // Omaha? they said. What’s in Omaha? / It was a good question, but in truth // we weren’t moving, just using / the drama to draw shoppers.
Putting Up Fish
MISTEE ST. CLAIR Rows of Yukon kings hung / in strips over alder frames. / A tin shack held the smoke / so it drifted / around the fish, / which dripped a dark orange oil / onto blackened soil. The run / was thick as willows, and twice a day / the men took the boat across the river…
Walden
STEPHEN HAVEN Whatever Walden is to me—we swam there two Julys— / I hope to skirt that never-ending trope, / Drowning like a pilgrim in that pond. / We pushed past mothers and their kids, / Cedared summers in Wellfleet cottages...
Contemporary Art Platform: Selections from Kuwait
CONTEMPORARY ART PLATFORM is a nonprofit organization founded in 2011, dedicated to developing and supporting the arts in Kuwait and throughout the region.
Berber Perfumes
HOODA SHAWA QADDUMI They say that, sometime at the end of the nineteenth century, a woman came on a wooden ship from Najd, married a wealthy man from the island, and, when she didn’t conceive, had a maqam built on the ruins of a pagan temple near the cliffs of the shore.
After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse / Prayer for the Clinically Obese
OMOTARA JAMES On the last day, let there be a fat inhalation / of delight between the lap of our sunrise. // As the tongue separates the doubt from the cream, / let pleasure sift through the metal strainer of time. Only // hours now.
Night of the Mermaid
BASSAM ALMUSALLAM A silver sea cascades from the full moon, enveloping the night. The moonlight inundating the neighborhood spills through the porthole and caresses her face. She’s asleep next to me. I move closer. The wall’s shadow slams my face. It lifts its black lids and a hundred red eyes stream out.
Body
SULAIMAN AL-SHATTI Whenever she spoke, my mother habitually turned down her upper lip and clenched her teeth as if to control the flow of her words—filtering them, if you will. Her teeth were white and strong; they were free of blemishes, except for the three that had been chipped.
The Story of a Box
JEFFREY HARRISON I often thought of Teeny and Aggie during this project. Though I never attended a séance to make contact with them, I did have a dream in which I found a letter Teeny had written to Marcel after his death, but I couldn’t remember what it said when I woke up.
A Minor History of Potato Chips
TINA CANE Ray Liotta was listening to tapes of Henry Hill talking through a mouth / full of potato chips to the FBI around the same time I high and hunched / over a bowl of Lucky Charms was listening to my father. lecture me on sex / at 2…
Jack Benny
MITCH SISSKIND John Ashbery called me after he died / So you can imagine my excitement / When in his droll hyper-nasalated / Timbre quite undiminished by death / He chatted on about the bowls of / Pitted cherries provided as snack-food / In the upper worlds and of afternoons / Climbing trees
Grace's Folly
JAKE LANCASTER I bring a Thermos full of hot chocolate mixed with a few shots of Rumple Minz, stale donut holes from Village Foods, and sometimes an uplifting book about how to live a better life that I always end up losing before I can give it back to my sister, Deena.
The Kitchen
ESTABRAQ AHMAD In a departure from daily routine, she went on an angry, blabbering rampage, hurling her son’s glass pill bottles into my lap, smashing cups and plates, and turning on the faucet. Water and bits of glass floated everywhere—oh, my, I got so dizzy and regurgitated the larger pieces.
Albatross
ANNA BADKHEN Aunt Lyuba was a spinster who had no family, which to us girls meant that she loved no one, and she was what we had after Mama died. Mama had loved a lot. First she loved Natasha’s father, then mine. After my father left, she loved communism. Its collapse crushed her.
For Acedia
ROBERT CORDING Thomas Aquinas prescribed fervent prayer, / and I do pray, but, oddly, a bird has been / my best medicine when I find myself shrunken / and absent, as I do each year as the anniversary / of my son’s death approaches. And so I turn again / to this: a dipper
From A Distance, He Approaches
KHALID AL-NASRALLAH Barefoot. I don’t know how we did it. Around noon on those April days, my father would do his best to stop me from going out. After lunch, he’d stomp around the house locking all the doors: the kitchen, the front door, the back door, the main living room.
Aphorism 57: You Cannot Fail at Being You
JOHN BLAIR We cherish ourselves even to the bones / which like some mother’s rigid hangers / hold us to our lacquered shapes in the smug / dialetheia of am and briefly was until / we come to our raveled ends everyone / just taking up space until space takes us back
Ramadan in Saint-Denis
ALA FOX It is Ramadan in Saint-Denis, the banlieue north of Paris. It is almost 21:00h on a June Sunday, and the sun hangs a hazy orange in the sky. The elevator in Amir’s building is broken so we climb the six stories, past the floors of muffled French Arabic and children’s screams.
Nina and Frida Enter the Chat
FELICE BELLE these biddies with their deadbolt backs/ take naps / while i construct/ canvas from corset cast / art does not wait until you are well / what they did not understand—the training was classical / chopin, motherfuckers/ carry on like she some backwater bluesy / least common denominator