If you ever want to feel real,
even important,
cry on the street.
Sob. Heave. Bum a half-smoked cigarette.
Drunks rally around your wet eyes:
A woman brings a paper cup of soft serve.
A man in a floral shirt puts his hand on your shoulder
to deliver queer advice:
“You’re just going through it, hun.
We’re all always going through it.”
Kevin Hautigan is from South Florida and lives in New York City. He graduated from Georgetown University.
DAVID RYAN
He'd forgotten this shirt for many years, just another drifting article of faith, as the smaller artifacts of the last couple of decades have been subsumed, lost beneath the greater accrual of a pain fused to the loneliness, the unbearable gathering of what Jonathan sees as Now in light of Then.
AFTON MONTGOMERY
The forestry scientists said Moscow has some of the unhappiest trees in the world. I remember clearly my friend telling me this, though I don’t remember much about her explanation of why. It’s possible she said unhealthiest rather than unhappiest and my brain overwrote her telling with my own truth.
CAROLINE M. MAR
That's a reconciliation that I'm often grappling with, which is about positionality. What am I responsible for? What's coming up for me; who am I in all of this? How can I be my authentic self and also how do I maybe take some responsibility?
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.