1. Texts
“When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit-roast.”
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
We hung, chiefly, with actresses who read only
the highlighted sections of scripts, we understood,
better not to become too involved in narratives
that might not love us, we derived great pleasure
By RAE PARIS
for my niece, who got the part of a vine in The Secret
Garden at her predominantly White school
Your worried face wonders if you can do this. How does
a vine think? What does it feel? Do vines own hearts,
and if so do they beat fast or slow? What about souls?
I always hide behind my hair, even when I don’t have hair. I disappeared
inside my shaved head, identity de facto of college, coming out. Camouflaged
in plain sight, a faux reveal, ersatz openness of skin & neck.
By WILL SCHUTT
I
After a shower I fill the tub with water, stick fresh candles into candlesticks and brace each heavy planter in the yard. From the rain guard gutter I rake leaves. Watching the sun press through shuttling clouds, I see there’s no such thing as reprieve without broad damage. Electricity comes and goes, yellow leaves circulate in clusters, treetops contort. The dissonance is too like the news, external hysteria masking an inward calm that moves it, a wave of pictures uploaded to iPhones, the opposite of poetry, which prepares the long confusion for its shape.
and I can’t sleep so I’m up thinking
too hard scribbling these words in the dark
because the physics science news I read
before bed is making me crazy now
with incomprehension—it makes
no sense to me that gravity should exist,
what I know about is love:
Guess I should forget to buy
the lottery ticket every time
I buy my generic cigs
at the Get ’N Go. There’s no chance
my get-rich dream will happen.
Like to think that way though.
By PAOLA PERONI
Last year, Antonio Greco committed suicide after attempting to kill his wife with a hammer. The doctors refused to speculate on the prognosis of his wife, hospitalized in critical condition. When we heard the news, I said I was only surprised Antonio had waited so long to try to kill Maria.
The closer they get to Wickersfield, the slower she wants to go. She’ll stay in the car and never get out, they can just keep driving, taking detour after detour until they are lost completely. With the roads torn up like this, Allison will not be to blame. We tried, she’ll say from a B&B somewhere in Canada, but it was just impossible to get there. Arrival means smiling, means forgetting all she has seen, and she isn’t yet ready to do that. She watches the once lovely scenery unscroll outside the passenger-side window: trees that look like they’ve been dipped in milk chocolate, cornfields trampled by dinosaurs. Sometimes half the road itself is missing, snapped off like a cracker and tossed aside, lying in the mud with the guardrail. The road narrows down to one lane marked off by orange cones and Jersey barriers, and cars have to negotiate with each other, managing a degree of civility Allison didn’t think possible without uniformed intervention. They pass through woods and meadows, farmhouses off in the distance, now miles from the interstate that brought them here. The flood has drained from the roads and fields and forests, no body of water glowers off in the distance, but clearly a big river has ripped its way through here, sweeping up boulders and gravel alike, tossing them behind like loose change. What must the cows have thought, when the water rose, when everything they knew was washed away?
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.