By: ALISON PRINE
The opposite of losing you
was watching you across the purple light
of the dance floor in the local gay bar
while the salt trucks dragged through the streets.
By MIK AWAKE
Became a skinhead
a year after he moved from
Bumblefucktucky.
Hit me with his cast.
Hurt people hurt people
often with their hurt parts.
Who broke his arm?
His step-dad step on him?
They was poor, but they was white.
By MATT SALYER
Check me on fleek like the night
kitchen mothers, pucker and hum some; come,
I like to liquor louche; let’s watch the flock
of spring-heeled bound as borough cabs
exhaust their carbon phantoms like a gauche
of fuck. Do you unzoo, unrouge
to rat as white, what roughshod? Do.
I want the carnal as straight metacognition,
By WILL PRESTON
After the mine fell quiet, the town slowly went to sleep. The barber changed his hours to Thursday and Friday, by request only. The bank hung a handwritten note to transfer accounts and securities by the end of the month. The last passenger bus pulled up to the curb and drove away.
The streets lie empty now, so quiet you can hear the leaves breaking from their branches. Ghosts on the baseball diamond, in the bowling alley, in the gymnasium. Long shadows across overgrown grass. The afternoon sun sinks early into the mountains.
By ADAM PADGETT
Melvin came upon a man frozen and dead out in the interior, perhaps caught in a snowstorm he hadn’t anticipated. Melvin hooked his sled to a birch tree. His team of dogs sat and panted, tongues spilling out of their mouths in rosy lengths. Echo, the leader, barked, and so he stopped a moment to rub her ears. Amelia had named her for the pattern of gray and black echoing down the ridge of the dog’s spine and tail. He thought of his wife whenever he rubbed the animal’s ears, but she was gone from him, almost two years now.
Join the staff and interns of The Common for our launch of Issue 14! Come to hear readings from our new issue and enjoy wine and cheese in the Mead Art Museum’s beautiful Rotherwas Room.
Free and open to the public – students, parents, and local lit lovers all welcome!
Join Issue 14 contributors Josephine Rowe, Mik Awake, and Maria Terrone to celebrate the launch of The Common‘s fall issue. RSVP to our Facebook event here!
Thursday, November 2
7pm
WORD Brooklyn
126 Franklin Street
This month The Common brings you a selection from the anthology WORDS FOR WAR, NEW POEMS FROM UKRAINE, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, forthcoming next month from Academic Studies Press.
The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.
ANASTASIA AFANASIEVA | “Can there be poetry after:”
BORYS HUMENYUK | “Our platoon commander is a strange fellow”
ALEKSANDR KABANOV | “He came first wearing a t-shirt inscribed ‘Je suis Christ,’”
KATERYNA KALYTKO | “April 6”
LYUDMYLA KHERSONSKA | “When a country of — overall — nice people”
SERHIY ZHADAN | “Third Year into the War”
Folks, it’s September. Time to stow away that summer beach read and pull out the award-winning tome that’s going to get you noticed by the cute grad student in the coffee shop. This month, read about starkly different economic and cultural worlds existing side by side. As the poor and the rich, the colonizer and the native shift uneasily along slippery fault lines, these recommendations offer brutal looks at friction between and within communities. Harrowing and insightful, you’ll be so engrossed you won’t even notice the number written on your to-go cup.
Recommendations: Tales of Two Americas edited by John Freeman, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and News of the World by Paulette Jiles.
Love reading The Common and want to see our staff’s smiling faces in person? Stop by our table at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, September 17 from 10am-6pm at Table 347 in front of the courthouse. We’ll be giving away a special, tasty something while supplies last! For more information about the Festival marketplace and all the events and authors, visit www.brooklynbookfestival.org.
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