No moon tonight but the white bells of a woman’s
eyes squinting tacitly toward a camera, staring out
from the glossy page of a high school yearbook
on a spring evening that stings like the elegy
Nostalgia is a well-
intentioned wound,
you have to hold
it in mind all at once—
you have to need it
enough. I’ve been
1
the inexpressible isn’t that which cannot
be expressed but that which will fall
expressed upon deaf eardrums meet with
sightless eyes centerfolded even
or on the front cover it will escape notice
and upon the face itself remain undetected
because mere expression isn’t all it takes
to be detected to be reasonably considered
expressed to others brothers sisters cousins
or indeed a disinterested passerby
hiding all in plain sight and only the fool thinks
no wait the fool does not even think that
no mystery is gone missing from his equation
a haze of sadness covering what is truly true
I think of all the ways
the women in my family have died,
the slow disease of genetics and childbirth
here in the curve of my cheekbone.
By EMMA SLOLEY
The cemetery where she meets him after work is both vertiginous and claustrophobic. The graves are crowded closely together, like huddled children cowering from punishment, then there is a short stretch of lawn tilting to the cliff’s edge, and beyond that a sickening void she imagines rushing out to meet her. Why would it occur to someone to build a cemetery on a steep escarpment above the Pacific Ocean? The weed-hemmed tombstones are cracked and bleached. No one has been buried here for ages; they’re all in the fashionable new cemetery out near the airport. The paths are strewn with shards of glass, the torn petals of sad plastic flowers, scraps of trash, and shriveled cigarette butts, and the whole thing might have an air of tawdriness if not for that view: blinding blue sky sliced horizontally by the cliff edge, the wild ocean below. The audacious, swaggering drama of it.
To see the unseeable, measure
its shadow. It takes eight telescopes
on six mountains and
four continents
ten days.
By ABDELMAJID HAOUASSE
Translated by NASHWA GOWANLOCK
An hour before their father would wake up and take them to the beach, they lay under a block of sunshine in the courtyard of the house. They waited an hour, or longer, until they were almost fed up. But they kept occupying themselves lazily with the blueness above, as the hands of time crept by.
By MOHAMED ZAFZAF
Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE
—We simply must get a band in to play at the women’s section of the party. A party’s nothing without drumming and dancing.
—If my first wife demanded that of me, I would never have granted her wish. But you…you know the place you have in my heart.
Nuwara was twenty-two years old, slight, and a little snub-nosed. What made up for that, however, was the rosy bloom of her cheeks and the existence of that exquisite mole between her left cheekbone and her nose. And although her clothed body didn’t stand out as anything special, when she was naked and in the hands of a man, she became a real woman. She was tastier than any fantasy, as sweet as a ripe fruit out of season. Any man could see that. That’s why Ahmed was saying to her now:
—You know I give in to all your demands. But a male band performing to a group of women? I can’t imagine that.
Fátima Policarpo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Her Borders Become Her,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Policarpo talks about creating an essay that includes elements of ghost stories, using language barriers and rich settings to set up complicated dynamics between family members who bully, and are later bullied in turn. She also discusses her current manuscript, a longer work incorporating many of the ideas and themes explored in this essay, and about her work teaching writing and literature with a focus on human rights education.
By CARLA ZANONI
Kathy Curto’s memoir, Not for Nothing: Glimpses Into A Jersey Girlhood, is a dynamic and bittersweet retelling of the author’s childhood in which she seeks to understand and reconcile the inner workings of her family while lifting the veil of the American dream. The book, Curto’s first, is told through a series of 52 loosely-connected humorous and poignant vignettes. It takes a close look at her Italian-American family, from behind closed doors as well as in the eyes of the southern New Jersey community around them.
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