Boys

By CRALAN KELDER
when the boys came over
theo with his banjo david
brought his voice we set
some poems to music
berrigan’s Train Ride &
the one about his old house
that he would miss and
the one that got to me
was Letters from Vicksburg,
Civil War sonnets, true stories,
transcribed by Gildner in which
the boy who never came home
wrote to his wife and friend
about how they “hit and
cut us all to peases” and about
the boys who “huncked the ground
and wept as close as posable

 

Cralan Kelder is the author of Give Some Word. His work has recently appeared in Zen Monster, Poetry Salzberg Review, and VLAK, among other publications. Kelder currently edits the literary magazines Full Metal Poem and Retort. He lives in Amsterdam with the evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers and their children.

[Purchase your copy of Issue 02 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Boys

Related Posts

They Could Have

CONSTANTINE CONTOGENIS
I’m just trying, wretch that I am, to put my life together. / Now, had the ruling gods bothered, they could have / made a fourth, who was good. / I’d have followed him, with pleasure. 

March 2026 Poetry Feature: Welcome Back Peter Filkins

PETER FILKINS
pissarro is dead cézanne too / swept away like willowed flotsam / that brute degas gone as well / chafing tides the sea of years // long ago battles fought discarded / ballast tossed from fame’s balloon / rising like heat and the unheard prices / feeding straw to the fires of need // for more garden cuttings variants

Two Poems by Heather Bourbeau

This forest is named for the first head of the National Forest Service, who warned of assuming natural resources were inexhaustible, who said without conservation we pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure, who asked if these resources were for the benefit of us all or for the use and profit of a few? He was also a leading eugenicist.