Issues

Podcast: A. J. Bermudez on “The Sixteenth Brother”

May 8, 2026 Audio, Issue 30 Fiction, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

A. J. BERMUDEZ speaks to EMILY EVERETT about her story “The Sixteenth Brother,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. With a fable-like feel, the story explores the dynamics of family and gender roles in Morocco, as fifteen brothers scheme to convince their youngest sibling to allow the sale of the family’s ancient and opulent riyad. A. J. discusses the story’s framing device—a storyteller relaying it, almost like gossip—and how it creates both intimacy and distance. She also talks about her work in film, and the interplay between writing for the page and for the screen.

Working In

April 24, 2026 Fiction, Issue 31, Issue 31 Fiction

By ANDREW STEINER

The first time I saw Lake I was sitting on the bench between sets, waiting for the burn in my chest to subside. She walked past me to the big cage and slung her duffel to the floor. I watched with idle interest as she wrapped her wrists with soft black straps and wrangled her hair into a high loop. Her rose-colored Alphaletes came up well above her hips, and she wore a long-sleeved crop top that announced in block letters

NO TIME FOR RATS.

NO TIME FOR SNAKES.

A Story is an Offering: Notes on Storytelling and Inherited Memory

April 24, 2026 Essays, Issue 31, Issue 31 Essays

By NATALIE LINH BOLDERSTON

A story is an offering—
something with a bright, burstable skin and tender flesh.

Whenever my mother gives me one of her stories, I watch her cut into it, lay it out for me in a way I can consume, in a way she can bear.

The Grave Fox

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By DANIEL TOBIN

Like a dog truant among the tended plots
it turns back toward us a considerate eye
as though sensing the disquiet of our being

lost here among all the unfamiliar graves
that would be landmarks proving the right way
if this were the way we’d believed it to be.

Supermarketing

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By LAUREN DELAPENHA

The miracle of the chain:
here, you could be anywhere

and still find the same winter tomatoes
(Greece, California, Spain),

Jesus’ Body Found Outside Ice Cream Parlor in Black Suburb

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By STEFAN BINDLEY-TAYLOR

His left wrist dangled out the half-wound-down glass of a boxy brown Cadillac with red felt seats. Flies drifted in and out. He had a dip top cone in his hand. The place was famous for them. You’d think it would be melting in the heat, but the molten chocolate shell held the ice cream within firm and cold. The air reeked of gasoline. No one had thought to turn the engine off.

Dead Man’s Association

April 24, 2026 Fiction, Issue 31, Issue 31 Fiction

By SINDYA BHANOO

Dead Man’s Association meets every Wednesday evening at Padiyappa’s Tea Stall & Smoke Shop. I am the president and the primary focus of the club. There is only one table at Padiyappa’s, but at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, no local would dare take my spot. It’s been this way for the past fifteen years. The tea stall boy, a new chap, hands us stainless steel tumblers of piping hot tea and then hangs around to stare at me.

“Po da,” I say to him, eyeing his hairless chest, visible because his top two buttons are not fastened. “This is not a circus. Let me be.”

Nocturne for Dark Things

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

I do my finest listening in the dark.
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.

One of the marvels of my life—
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade

from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
Here’s more dark: sometimes birds sleep
tucked under a giraffe’s dusky armpit

Naow’s Boutique

April 24, 2026 Essays, Issue 31, Issue 31 Essays

By RO SKELTON

The first apartment that I lived in in Dakar was brand new and backed onto the far end of the airport runway, so that from my bedroom window I had a distant view of the ocean and of a vast baobab tree silhouetted against the hazy Saharan sky. The neighborhood––modest two-story family homes and the occasional new building like mine––was as far out of town as taxis would go, and even then they would refuse to take me the whole way, grumbling as they dropped me at the entrance to the neighborhood, so that I had to walk the rest of the way to my apartment along a potholed, sandy road.

[Freedom Song]

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By FATIMAH ASGHAR

what does it mean, to be free? i sip coke at my phuppos, azaadi
on the walls of the university, free kashmir sprawled, azaadi

on my body. when i walk the streets of lahore men stare.
can i write the poem that makes me free, that brings azaadi

to my lips? i say i want to drink from its waters, but i know
what it means to be human & dumb, to pray & when azaadi

comes to shun, to judge & say not like this. control, a bitch
deeply un-free, that sticks me in my own mind, azaadi

Podcast: A. J. Bermudez on “The Sixteenth Brother”

Working In

A Story is an Offering: Notes on Storytelling and Inherited Memory

The Grave Fox

Supermarketing

Jesus’ Body Found Outside Ice Cream Parlor in Black Suburb

Dead Man’s Association

Nocturne for Dark Things

Naow’s Boutique

[Freedom Song]

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