Siani Ammons

Dispatch from Camelback Mountain

February 5, 2025 Dispatches

Phoenix, AZ

Camelback’s faces wither in the sun. I used to hate Arizona and coming here and then I moved here and hated it and left and now all I think about is a good summer day and the lazy way a person can be themselves sifting through the desert, eating pizza, all that kind of stuff anyone does anywhere else, except then this mountain Camelback is available to burn off all those cheese calories. And that’s not the same everywhere. There is a part of me who everyday thinks of being back in Arizona walking around blistering days, laughing how when I had them to myself, I had thought this was the end of the line, that there had never been a worse place on earth. That’s mid-thirties type clarity.

Grey Dumplings

January 9, 2025 Essays, Translation

By GRZEGORZ KASDEPKE
Translated from Polish by JONATHAN BAINES

Piece appears below in English and the original Polish.

Translator’s Note

The memoir-plus-bonus-recipe ‘Grey Dumplings’ by Grzegorz Kasdepke is taken from the volume Królik po islandzku (2022). When it appears in English, I hope it’ll have the title Icelandic Rabbit. It’s a collaboration with the novelist Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki. The two authors take it in turns to share a snapshot from their lives, each with a relevant recipe tacked on the end. The stories are accompanied by Aleksandra Cieślak’s striking illustrations. (Ask your search engine to show you the cover!) The short prose pieces are unfailingly comic, but there’s always something more serious going on as well. There are thirty vignettes – and thirty recipes – in total and an atmosphere of friendly competition as they stack up. Cumulatively, they paint a vivid picture of Polish life over the last several decades. ‘Grey Dumplings’ is the first of Kasdepke’s contributions. I was drawn to it by the same qualities that illuminate his writing for children: a lightly-worn irony and an exhilarating curiosity about the world.

— Jonathan Baines

Grey Dumplings

The smaller the flat, the more friction – literally and figuratively – between family members.

My parents lived in a small room in my grandparents’ flat. They were very young (as a child, of course, I didn’t appreciate that, but it’s clear to me now – and perhaps my father’s mustache did seem a little thin). It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, just until they were assigned their own three-bedroom flat on the Dziesięciny estate in Białystok. It went on for ten years. Goethe would have seen the beauty in this, at least from my childish point-of-view. One two-roomed flat and three generations: that’s the real magic of numbers, don’t you think?

The Con Artist

December 3, 2024 Fiction

By GLENN BERTRAM

In April, Simon went down to Murray Park to eat hamburgers with the Methodists. It was his monthly tradition. The Methodists’ burgers were charred and rubbery, but the Methodists themselves made ideal marks. They were upstanding citizens with steady jobs at regional banks and local power stations. They’d known neither poverty nor wealth. And they weren’t teetotalers like the Baptists, so you could ply them with craft beer and get them yapping about golf and gambling and everything their marriages lacked. They assumed good faith in the people around them. Simon loved the Methodists. Despite his taste, he chose to find them charming: a matter of professional habit. It was Leonard who’d showed him the way. You had to love your marks.

Dispatches from Ellesmere

October 30, 2024 Dispatches

By BRANDON KILBOURNE

A rocky landscape with yellow tents in the distance.

Photos courtesy of the author.

Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada

Ellesmere Elegy

This land dreams up marvels:

a meteorite shower of clumpy
snow streaking under midnight’s sun.

This land embodies ruses:

broad valley floors and nondescript
slopes distorting scale and distance.

A Humble Invitation from Your Floor Supervisor

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By DOUGLAS KOZIOL

Watch the author read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:

It was an early afternoon in mid-July, the sun at the height of its powers, and while Laura was stirring a gin and tonic, her co-workers were stretching their picket line across the parking lot of the New Epoch shoe factory. Sitting in a wicker chair on the stained deck of the palatial home of the floor supervisor and his wife, a cool breeze sweeping through the overhanging trees, her ears buzzing with the chirping of birds and the bubbling of the pool filter, Laura told herself she never wanted to be here. She knew any deal between workers and management had to be made with the backing of the entire factory floor. Otherwise, the bosses would try to pick them off one by one, like lions to lagging gazelle. Still, it had been decided she would accept the supervisor’s offer to negotiate over dinner, if not to strike a deal, then at least to feel the man out.

The screen door to the house screeched open, and Laura turned to find her supervisor’s wife, Fatimah, stepping out onto the deck with a tray of charcuterie and a pair of fresh drinks.

Dead Elm (Plufort VI)

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By KATHERINE HOLLANDER

It stood beside the dining hall and taller than the dining hall
by half again as much, and in all weather, against all skies
it was like a lit synapse, wild. We went in and out under it

Silent Spring

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL

I saw a barn owl staring out from a telephone wire
driving down the road with the sky looking
like the edges of the newspaper we crumpled
into balls to light the woodstove

Kakosmos

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By JILL PEARLMAN

The Common Magazine · "Kakosmos" by Jill Pearlman

Human systems exist in the mystery
always at the point of spilling
over green, over and over their present containers
of cities and grids and human perception

for what of entanglements, what of catastrophes
what of black holes, of soot from burnt timber
what of seashells, snails, urchins in the pavement
of ancient Greek settlements

Remembrances

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By ANTÒNIA VICENS
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN

Palma, 1978

One day he came, handed me a little box, and said look, look inside. Oh God, what a husband, I was afraid maybe he was losing it, another day it had been look, open this package, and there were more than half a dozen bras with ruffles. I opened the little box and was practically blinded by a stone brighter than the sun. No explanation, nothing, business is coming along, he said. And at night, here we go, trying for an heir, but that wasn’t coming along at all.

Translation: Two Poems by Edith Bruck

October 10, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By EDITH BRUCK

Translated by JEANNE BONNER

Poems appear below in English and the original Italian.

Translator’s Note

What I find indelible about Edith Bruck’s work is the subtle ways she introduces the topic of the Holocaust. A poem like “Pretty Soon” provides a glimpse of the author’s mindset – she managed to survive Auschwitz, and she hasn’t wasted a moment since her liberation as a teenager. She’s been incredibly prolific as a writer, and has traveled the world. But winning her freedom is an event forever married to the worst event ever: losing both of her parents in concentration camps. The challenge is to render that subtlety, which in the original is effortless. This is her life – it’s what she’s always known.

This thematic back and forth is also present in “There Were Eight of Us.” There were eight of us – but not anymore. One brother was swallowed up by the Holocaust, to use a phrase Bruck often employs in other work.