Dispatches | The Common

Danish Dispatch

January 7, 2026 Dispatches

Copenhagen, Denmark

My grandfather sits in a recliner and watches infomercials on television. It is 2:57 in the afternoon on an American Sunday and a man wearing a cheap suit tries selling him the New King James Version Bible in twelve parts on CD.

I call from Copenhagen where the time is 8:57pm and the sun has already set. An electronic operator speaks words in Danish I cannot decipher before the static spindles through air and across several oceans until my grandfather picks up his landline.

Harmony Presbyterian Church, he says into the phone. This is his greeting. No Hello or Can I help you? He has no caller ID and does this to defend himself against telemarketers. He tells me, If you answer with the name of a church, they are not allowed to sell you anything, and then purses his lips and nods his head one time, each time he says this.

The Ground That Walks

December 17, 2025 Dispatches

By ALAA ALQAISI

Gaza, Palestine

We stepped out with our eyes uncovered.
Gaza kept looking through them—
green tanks asleep on roofs, a stubborn gull,
water heavy with scales at dawn.

Nothing in us chose the hinges to slacken.
The latch turned without our hands.
Papers practiced the border’s breath.
On the bus, the glass held us—
a pond that would not name who stays.

Dispatches from Søgne, Ditmas Park, and Temple

December 3, 2025 Dispatches

By JULIA TOLO

Søgne, Norway, July 8, 2018

Sitting around the white painted wood and metal table
that hosted the best dinners of my childhood
my uncle is sharing
his many theories of the world
the complexities of his thoughts are
reserved for Norwegian, with some words here and there
to keep his English-speaking audience engaged

I don’t translate, don’t want to
repeat those thoughts
in any language

but we have a nice time
there’s a cheesecake with macerated peaches
and mint

the sun is low and through the window to my grandma’s house
the heavy lace curtains are catching the light

Nails, Tooth, and Tub

November 19, 2025 Dispatches

By TOLA SYLVAN

Blurry photo of a road with houses and snow.

Photo courtesy of author

Hida Furukawa, Japan 2025

I make a list of some observations:

the baby’s cheek, below it
spidery veins like a leaf

stalk of tempura (crab or shrimp? something pink)
pale yellow like a new bud in spring

Tethered Hearts

November 5, 2025 Dispatches

By LARA ATALLAH

From Buenos Aires, Argentina

For Eduardo Rios Pulgar,

San Telmo rings through me, like an unlived memory from a distant past. All colors, linden trees, worn down buildings, from the last century and the one before it, next to towering cement. The Argentinian Peso crumbles like the Lebanese Lira. We collect its ruins at the casa de cambio, our American dollars grotesque in the face of this country’s protracted collapse. The city is angry with love. Its sidewalks echo Beirut, and a life there, long-forgotten, languishing in the rearview mirror. Everywhere I look, an almost-déjà-vu skims the walls of my mind. Buenos Aires is Beirut, is Paris, is an aubade to the lost and never found. Down by Recoleta, Haussmann buildings dot the avenues. Dregs of a time where French architects flooded the city and left their prints along its urban landscape.

Dispatch from Red Lake, Croatia

October 22, 2025 Dispatches

By MARIA B. OLUJIC

Photo courtesy of author

Red Lake, Croatia

“Why are they so persistent in trying to explore the unknowable?”
~Comment from a villager, following the latest Red Lake expedition

“During the Drought,” “Sestina, Mount Mitchill,” “Dragonflies”

October 8, 2025 Dispatches

By LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
The Jersey Shore, NJ, USA

During the Drought

During the drought, we traded water
for wine. Let our plants wither, stopped

doing laundry. Learned to shudder
at the smell of fire. Hoped

it was just some asshole with a chiminea. Every
impostor cloud was suspect: steam rising

On the Shores of Baileys Harbor

October 1, 2025 Dispatches

By BEN TAMBURRI

Photo courtesy of author

Baileys Harbor, WI

Baileys Harbor has always felt like a place that is eternally old, eternally in the past. It is a destination for quiet summers on the Wisconsin peninsula, where the insignia of range lights and lighthouses decorate the bathroom of every home, and Dala horses wreath the doors. It was the place of my youth, even if it was only for a week each year. As a kid, when my family visited, I felt at home among the retired condo-dwellers.

The Garden of the Gods

September 24, 2025 Dispatches

By ELI RODRIGUEZ FIELDER

Two children kneel on a large rock surface. Large grey boulders and a forest of trees are visible in the distance.

Photo courtesy of author

Herod, Illinois

There are two Gardens of the Gods, but the one in Southern Illinois fit our budget. On the drive down from Iowa City, we listen to podcasts about Norse and Greek mythology to fill the twins’ heads with ideas of magic, with the hope that they might complain less about the hiking. From their car seats, they point out farms with broken corn stalks and a Burger King, making the argument that we must still be in Iowa. Even though we’ve traveled six hours, their six-year-old brains haven’t yet connected time and distance. But I’ve been in the Midwest long enough to know the difference between the farms around a college town and farms around a farming town. And if I wasn’t wisened to it, the signage would teach me soon enough. Traveling through rest stops and restaurants puts us on edge. We make the outline of an average family with a couple of feral kids, if people don’t linger too long in their gaze.

Damascene Dream

September 10, 2025 Dispatches

By AYA LABANIEH

Anaheim, California, dreaming of Damascus, Syria — a place I have not been able to visit since the war began in 2011.

I had a dizzying dream last night. I picked up the phone, and called my grandma—my mom’s mom, the woman who raised me. She was laughing—I told her something about what I had been going through, I don’t remember what. I was being candid in a way that would be unthinkable in the real world; maybe I even told her about the ugly breakup with R. The warm acceptance on the other line astounded me. “Why don’t I call you more often?” I asked her.

“Wallah tayteh, I miss you, you should tell me everything.”