I do my finest listening in the dark.
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.
One of the marvels of my life—
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade
from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
Here’s more dark: sometimes birds sleep
tucked under a giraffe’s dusky armpit
![[Freedom Song]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/6780574655_9e0b767324_b.jpg)
what does it mean, to be free? i sip coke at my phuppos, azaadi
on the walls of the university, free kashmir sprawled, azaadi
on my body. when i walk the streets of lahore men stare.
can i write the poem that makes me free, that brings azaadi
to my lips? i say i want to drink from its waters, but i know
what it means to be human & dumb, to pray & when azaadi
comes to shun, to judge & say not like this. control, a bitch
deeply un-free, that sticks me in my own mind, azaadi
![[No one can take my anger]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1419132290_c90a4c34e3_b.jpg)
not even you who caused it.
& no one can take my madness
not even my honied friends
who try to pull me back from
the edge of myself, who update
each other in the groupchat
of how my body is wasting
![In Place of River I’ll Use [God]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ezza-Ahmed.jpg)
By EZZA AHMED
Ten days behind my tongue
summer in the diasporic,
riding thick in the smell of [God]
and fresh cloves.
By [God] I mean the monsoon season
where water appeared in snake-like streams
erasing all traces of my
present tense.
By EMILY NEMENS
She was running along the Manhattan side of the East River—this was in the bucolic “before” times, prior to when the city tore up the East Village’s riverside park, chucking its eighty-year-old trees and modernist amphitheater and ebullient perennial flower beds in the name of future flood mitigation—when she felt a curtain being snapped up the back of her left calf, krrrrrik! More lightning than pain. At first. Then, it became very painful. A hot pain that ran an invisible line down the meat of her calf, like those sexy stockings with seams, but the seams had turned carnivorous and were nibbling at her flesh with tiny razor teeth. Running farther, even slow-jogging the 1.3 miles home, was out of the question (her mental math: more pain multiplied by less time in transit, or less pain times more minutes; the latter had the lower sum), so she slowly limped back from the river, putting as little weight on her left foot as possible. She wondered what she would do.
By EZZA AMHED
Because I didn’t say Mashallah when she swapped her nose stud for a hoop and two days later I’m met by the bursting bulb of blood and pus which seals the fibrous innards of her nose cartilage on the outside sits the bulb pulsing expanding as if it’s breathing looks like a red evil eye ornament white pupil right at the center she has a nose growing out of her nose
Reggie pulled his truck up the driveway and past the old goat pasture, a field of knee-high brome that now fed only a rusted tractor, not a buck or a nanny in sight. The only good thing about his wife’s death all those years ago—he could finally let go of the shaggy herd she had loved so much, fill the freezer, and focus on the more agreeable ruminants.
Reggie killed the ignition next to the house. One coal-colored cloud floated like a top hat above his yellow lopsided rancher. Past that, the afternoon sun painted the foothills a fiery mauve. In the distance a trio of bluffs gave way to an abstract canvas, just cattle and rust-red desert smudging south to New Mexico and on into the Navajo Nation.
By JOHN T. HOWARD
New Harbor, Maine
From the porch of the cabin, we can see the waters off Maine’s Midcoast region down below, the audible crash of waves constant. We can also hear the dunting of the bell buoy, and, through a wispy cover of fog, we can see the spectral presence of certain small islands and headlands in closer waters. The fog, further out, is thick enough to make the furthest remnants of land invisible. A second thought: the closer strips look as if they are cut from age-faded pieces of colored paper once the color of blue. Beyond these blanched scraps of an atomic hue, I look through the deep stretch of fog and think stone and wood, think bone and sinew. Far from here, there are wars raging. Bombs being dropped, civilians dead, dying. Government as we expect it to function is dismantling. Or being dismantled. I peer even further into that stretch of nothingness and contemplate the recent departure of my father, my mother, my brother the day before. All of these familial connections with their complicated histories, long arms of trauma stretching back decades, well before my first year in this cabin in Maine three years ago.
By AIMEE LIU
He’s calling my name. About time. He’s been holed up in the bathroom for nearly an hour while my mother and I’ve busied ourselves elsewhere, pretending not to notice. Now as I wedge my way in, I find him seated on the rim of the tub like he’s waiting for an appointment.
Sickness has sallowed his skin and bruised the pouches around his eyes. His pale blue summer pajamas hang from his shrunken frame, and uncombed hair turbines around his head in a wild white corona. Yet my father sits up straight. He still manages to look irresistibly dashing in the way that Ray Milland might have, if he’d lived to ninety-five, had terminal cancer, and been half Chinese.
It is Easter weekend in a Catholic majority country. It’s Friday, and it feels like the whole world is counting down and holding its breath, waiting for a miracle they know will always come. Out here, though, Catholicism feels like a relic, a prop in an old mountain town with one main square. Something out of the Wild West, if such existed in Latin America. Old men sit around the square selling handmade tiles, reselling fake name-brand sports gear. A fine layer of dust covers everything.
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