Alma Clark

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

November 21, 2024 Poetry

Poems By G. C. WALDREP, ALLISON FUNK, and KEVIN O’CONNOR

Table of Contents:

G.C. Waldrep, “Below the Shoals, Glendale”
Allison Funk, “After Andrew Wyeth’s Snow Hill”
Kevin O’Connor, “The Other Shoe”

Below the Shoals, Glendale
By 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,

Little Women

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By MEGAN TENNANT

1.

In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.

The Window

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By IMMA MONSÓ
Translated by MARLENA GITTLEMAN

Lisa

Morning after morning, Lisa would wake up with an easily achievable aspiration: to eat breakfast while contemplating the house at the bottom of the valley, which stood in the distance amidst the fog. When the fog started to fade, she could make out frost-covered shingles and smoke rising from the chimney. She could glimpse the narrow ribbon of water that divided the field behind the house, until it disappeared into the darkness of the impenetrable forest. And she could, above all, train her gaze on a hypnotizing point: the only lit window, the window of an attic room, a room Lisa guessed was a study.

Dominus

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ANGIE MACRI

Danger, as in strangers, men or women;
as in twisters at night when you couldn’t
see them coming; as in the machines
that made work so easy you forgot
to watch what you were doing,

Diorama 1871 (say her name four times)

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By CATIE ROSEMURGY

Jane loved her and often thought of her skin. 
Its misleading surface area always moved her, how it wrapped around 
and became infinite. 

Iqra

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

Winner of the DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By IQRA KHAN

Watch the poet read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:

I begin as revelation. As explosion of glottal light against silence.
I am again asking for directions to the Haram, my ankles fluent in Arabic.

I am again asking for direction, ya Haram, my ankles flowing with Arabic!
Hagar, watch how God transforms this wilderness to civilization.

Against This Earth, We Knock

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Poetry, Studio

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By JINJIN XU

I try to feel this is home ¹

I don’t think

I am a foreigner ²
I was not supposed to be living ³

Woodpecker

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

The Common Magazine · “Woodpecker” by Jeffrey Harrison

By JEFFREY HARRISON

At first I thought the pileated woodpecker
that lifted up from the yard as we came home
from a walk in the woods, flapping
away on long black wings that curved
up at the tips and flashed white
underneath, might be a visitation

Theology of Flight

April 22, 2024 Audio, Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN

The Common Magazine · “Theology of Flight” by Christopher Bakken

Morning wind speaks a dialect of smoke,
brings news from yesterday and tomorrow:
what’s burning there will soon enough burn here.

One bullet. Even a rumor of bullet
restless in the chamber of a neighbor’s gun.
To run, before he arrives with his god.

Morning Light

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction, Translation

By JEMAL HUMED
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

The piece appears below both in English and the original Arabic.

For the fighter Taha Mohammed Nur [1]

1

The hallway is cold and disquieting, lined with austere doors marked with consecutive numbers, giving no indication of their occupants.

The corridor is never-ending, leading to a room at its end whose grand entryway, formidable and rigid, seems to surveil the movement of the other doors.

He stood in front of it and straightened his service uniform. He took deep breaths, as if to expel the fear that had accumulated between his ribs on this particular morning inside the prison.

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