We had this landlord, tanned and wiry, creepy, and he always had this look like what the hell?
He would park his truck sometimes out front and wait there all day. One time he’d gone fishing I guess, so he left a bag of fish in the bushes by the mailbox. Nobody knows why.
Join us for an hour of art and literature featuring readings from Issue 06 of The Common paired with related works of art on exhibit at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum. Wine, cheese, crackers, and fruit will follow.
I still hadn’t learned to swim, after the MacVicar’s pool,
and this pool’s water was cold enough to mask
the pain from knees banged and knuckles scraped
By JASON TUCKER
Your mother and I were made in places that will never be your place. Northern she and Southern I are about to start raising an Upper Midwestern you. At least while these jobs hold out.
By KEANE SHUM
There used to be an actual line. That we had to actually wait in. We used to line up from the elevator bank in the Harbour View Hotel across the bridge and over to the Great Eagle Centre, or double-backed towards Central Plaza, and we used to wait.We waited in the balmy near-summer heat if it was the prom after-party, or in the wincing wet cold when we were back from college for the holidays. We waited, we paid cover, we had tickets. We were young.
By HANNAH GERSEN
We show up at Mayflower Beach at ten one August morning, and the parking attendant, a tanned teenaged girl in a gold tee shirt, tells us we’re too late, the lot is full. To ensure a spot, it’s best to come around 8:00 a.m., or even earlier.
By CHRIS KELSEY
The first time I visited Copenhagen I decided to quit my job. I had spent five years working nearly 60 hours per week as an editor, I never took vacation, I was struggling with finances, and I was deeply unhappy. My parents, who were closing in on retirement, had been to Ireland not long before and the travel bug for Europe had struck. Now they chose Denmark. To my good fortune, they treated their three adult children to this August trip.
By ELLIOTT HOLT
My friend K. and I traveled to St. Petersburg on the overnight train from Moscow, where I lived then. She had come from New York to visit me. It was December, 1997, and the cold was brutal, but you have to see the Hermitage, I said. So we took the train north and then, at dawn, made our way to the international youth hostel. It was the first one in Russia—opened in 1992—and like every hostel I’d visited, it was full of backpackers eager to tell us how much of the world they had seen. No one’s hostile in a hostel, I said to K. She and I had been out of college for just a couple of years; our fellow travelers were about our age. Many of them were from Australia and New Zealand. At breakfast that first morning— a room with tentative light and forlorn bowls of muesli—we met a young Japanese-Finnish woman. (Her parents were Japanese, but she’d been raised in Finland.) She had traveled from Helsinki, she told us, to photograph corpses.
Hennessy, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, is author of the previous collection of poetry, _Bridge & Tunnel_. His poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2013, The Believer, Poetry, Harvard Review, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, & The Yale Review.
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