Dispatches | Page 2 | The Common

Sisterland

July 16, 2025 Dispatches

Photo courtesy of author

Ithaca, NY

I want to start by saying that this is not about when I was in a New York city cab and the cabbie and I struck up a concrete jungle duet about where we were from—Gaza, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Ukraine, India…—and what winds, fair or foul, had blown us to the country that’s being made great again by a certain real estate developer. I want to start by saying that in what I have to say there is no New York City or cabbie. That’s not the kind of story this is. Rather, in this story there is a sister—or sisters—and a land—or lands.

I want to start by saying that I propose, simply, a new topos for going “back home,” for the return to Ithaca. I call this topos Sisterland.

Florida Poems

July 2, 2025 Dispatches

By EDWARD SAMBRANO III

Photos courtesy of author.

Florida

After the Storm
(after Donald Justice)

I will die in Portland on an overcast day,
The Willamette River mirroring clouds’
Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting—
Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets.
They will leave for work barely in time
To catch their railcars. It will happen

On a day like today. Florida’s winter
Brings the satisfaction of sunlit goosebumps
As I read on the veranda wondering whether
To retrieve a sweater. I’m learning
Of life’s many versions of triviality,
Which merely manage to repeat themselves.

Farewell to Pictou County, N.S.

June 17, 2025 Dispatches

By COURTNEY BUDER

Pictou County, Nova Scotia, Canada

Lint blue thunder flavors the memory. The waves are enormous, curling up high and mighty like Caribou antlers. In hindsight: Why are we at the beach during a thunderstorm? But back then, in all of my five year old wisdom: The water is so warm and excited to see me.

The power went out for three days during one hurricane or another. My niece was only a baby, my mom and sister murmuring about warming the milk. Everybody crowded together onto a bed, every blanket in the house employed. I thought it was wonderful. I remember standing in the middle of the street, the wind tearing straight through me. I watched my red hat get sucked up and away into the grey, watched trees flail, calm as a clam, as a strange and lonely little girl transfixed, like watching a snow globe from the inside. The Ship Hector crept up onto Caladh Avenue and my mother finally burned the candle. Life went on.

Dispatch: Two Poems

June 4, 2025 Dispatches

By SHANLEY POOLE

a broken down, rusty car faces out toward a lightly forested, sunny, and hilly landscape.

Photo courtesy of author.

Hot Springs, North Carolina

A Mathematical Formula for Continuing

I’m asking for a new geography,
something beyond the spiritual.

Tell me again, about that first
drive up Appalachian slopes

how you knew on sight these hills
could be home. I want

Fathom

May 21, 2025 Dispatches

By SARA RYAN

statue of poseidon

Norfolk, Virginia/Virginia Beach, Virginia

When the whales wash up on shore, my friend grieves. I feel it too, but it feels further away. Deep in me, treading water, legs furiously churning under the surface. The first whale washes up on the oceanfront, just off the boardwalk. People drive out to stare at it. Its dark wet form deflates into the sand. I don’t drive to find it but think of it all day.

I scroll through the Facebook comments that claim it’s all the fault of the offshore windmills, the sonic waves mapping the ocean floor pummeling through the ocean. Everybody seems to have watched the same hoax-y documentary funded by the oil industry. But of course, it’s the boats. The whales scarred and torn up by container ships. 165,000 tons of steel running into migration paths.

dispatch from lebanon, 2023

April 30, 2025 Dispatches

By GHINWA JAWHARI

A photograph of a landscape with a road winding past the land.

Photos by Natasha Jahchan.

beirut and mount lebanon

Glass: Five Sonnets

April 16, 2025 Dispatches

By MONIKA CASSEL

Author’s Note:

Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.

Photo courtesy of author.

Berlin, Germany

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939

We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.

—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

March 19, 2025 Dispatches

Poems by S. VIJAYALAKSHMI, KUTTI REVATHI, and PUTHIYAMAADHAVI

Translated by THILA VARGHESE

A farm in Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by Flickr user Emily Abrams.

Mullai Nilam (The forest and pastoral region)

Forest Fire
By Vijayalakshmi

My forest is on fire,
and a solar sphere explodes within.

When I Go to Chicago

March 5, 2025 Dispatches

By SHELLEY STENHOUSE

Chicago, Illinois

things break. The last time, on the last day, the pipes in the kitchen burst and flooded my parents’ blonde wood floor. When I’m up in that 87^th floor apartment, I look at the sky’s blank expression. I keep the little square office window open for the sliver of nature. It’s hard to read with Fox News blaring, so I drift from room to room.

Each time before I fly to Chicago, I lose my debit card. This time it leapt out of my raincoat pocket on my way to the grocery store and refused to reappear. I had the new one shipped straight to the Hancock.

Dispatch from Marutha Nilam

February 19, 2025 Dispatches

Poems by SUKIRTHARANI, ILAMPIRAI, and SAKTHI ARULANANDHAM

Translated from the Tamil by THILA VARGHESE

Table of Contents:

Sukirtharani, “For the sake of living”
Ilampirai, “Loot”
Sakthi Arulanandham, “Land Grabbing Bird”

Black and white image of a bird with a long neck

Drawing by Sakthi Arulanandham for her poem “Land Grabbing Bird.”

Marutha Nilam (The agricultural and plains region)

For the sake of living
By Sukirtharani

In the courtyard filled with
bubbling water flowing from
the palm-leaf thatched roof
during monsoons,
grew a golden shower tree.
On that tree, yellow flowers
bloomed in clusters.
There was a nest on the tree
where sparrows with short beaks
would be chirping incessantly.
Sitting under the shade of the tree,
I would be studying passers-by.