Julia Pike

Phantom Tec

By SAHIBA GILL 

1.

When I read the list of companies who owned the now-ruined clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh—New Wave Bottoms, New Wave Style, Ether Tex, Phantom Tec—I thought about my walks in Abu Dhabi, which have been driven from the start by following the bright spool of electric shop names wrapping around each block. It’s not so much the city lights that pull me out there as their measurement of my distance from home, conveyed not in watts but in the degree of mistranslation.

Phantom Tec
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Speculative Summer School

By KATHERINE JAMIESON

At the threshold of summer, the sunglasses are on. Running in blue-sky mode, I’ve been talking up some ideas for multiplying the writing workshop times the architecture studio. Their product would be a format for storytelling across media, an alignment of complimentary strengths really well suited to engage the built environment.

Speculative Summer School
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The Common Statement

1.

I’ve been watching the Qasr al Hosn. Watching it since I arrived in August. The boarded-up block below my office window withholds this oldest structure in Abu Dhabi—the whitewashed fort—and the arch-studded building of the Cultural Foundation. The block has so much potential, but for months, nothing’s happened. Or, I’ll see a kick up of dust and realize it was the wind.

The Common Statement
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An Excerpt from “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”

by DON SHARE 

 

Grudging and begrudging me snow

       here where the broken water runs

(Grand Theft Auto… Shark Attack Pictures)

       and not in exile I reflect

that nobody in Ovid turns into

       their mother or father

An Excerpt from “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”
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May 2013 Poetry Feature

Don Share published three poems, including “Wishbone,” the title poem of his newest collection, in the first issue of The Common. He’s been on a roll ever since, publishing five books as author, translator, or editor in the last year and a half. Here are a few selections from and links to those volumes:

May 2013 Poetry Feature
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Maygold

By VIRGINIA REEVES

The first pest to make itself known in the orchard was the stinkbug, malevolent and focused. It worked at the sap in the fruit, sucking the water from the flesh, leaving behind gnarls and distortions—catfacing, Mona heard it called, though the injured peaches she plucked from her 
trees’ branches looked nothing like a cat’s face, but more a woman’s, withered by sun.

Maygold
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Meditation on a Ficus Tree

By DENISE DUHAMEL

 

mermaid legs/ whiskers/ open mouth/ callipygian bark/
semen sap/ elbow fold/ knees/ arms stretched above a head/
torso swung upside down/ hair sweeping the ground/
breasts/ cave turned inside out/ toes holding on/
eye socket/ palm/ thumb/ twisting veins/ freckle/ bellybutton/
vulva/ ghost fetus/ nose/ nipple/ thigh/ petrified cloud

Meditation on a Ficus Tree
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