Issue 25 | Page 3 | The Common

Spa Days

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

I drive through the yellow ribcage of maples
arching the road, past the butch woman I want
to be, raking leaves in her front yard, hair
slicked back at the sides. Yesterday, searching
the internet for winter tights, I found crotchless ones,
a model’s diffident fingertips barely obscuring
the hairless glow of her pussy, and remembered
the years I spent lying on a table in a quiet room,
piped sound of harps descending from the ceiling,
while some other woman carefully made my body
as smooth and unthreatening as a child’s.

Moving Sale

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By ANDERS CARLSON-WEE

Duluth, we said when a browser asked.
Omaha, we said to another.

Omaha? they said. What’s in Omaha?
It was a good question, but in truth

we weren’t moving, just using
the drama to draw shoppers.

The Cicadas Are Really Loud

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By EUGENE GLORIA

I ask the river if he were Rizal what he would be.
A boat on a river or a river in a boat.
Would Rizal rather be in the belly of a whale
or have a whale in his belly. I ask Rizal
as if he were a river and he never blinks
or makes smacking sounds to register his disapproval.

Madonna Litta

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By FRANCES RICHEY

c. 1490 Leonardo da Vinci

Oh, Mary! It must have been a revelation
to breastfeed your boy the will of God.
All I had to offer was the usual. For years
after my son was weaned, I still had milk.

Car Wash, Key Largo

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Issues, Poetry

By RICARDO PAU-LLOSA

2 Samuel 14:14

The soapy drench is physics drawn to river
toward me, 15 feet away in my flimsy
chair. At first its body fans to deliver
brims to concrete sinks I had not glimpsed,
then narrows to speed unveiling dips and bellies,
then courses on to a hole with a remnant pool
anchored by a cigar butt. A halt belies
its reaches. A lump has pushed the grey drool
around the promised lake in delta featherings
while another drive has passed beneath my seat
to rest in my colossal shadow, clearing
its slate of suds. The flow now ponds in the heat
and readies its ghost mirror to catch me, gray
in noon’s appraisals, the reaper of the day.

Postpartum

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By ERICA EHRENBERG

To have a blind spot
there must be
a surrounding clarity.
Being a mother
brings me the world
I have already
blindly traveled.

Near Murrell’s Inlet

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By MORRI CREECH

The flatteries of the surf conspire to make
a stammering innuendo in the reeds.
The sun, splintered by the spume’s refractions,
sinks toward the west where it will disappear
in a violet streak above the evening dunes,
like mind considering the defeat of mind.
A cormorant in the distance breaks the surface
to wrestle a mullet from the sullen depths
farther below which no light penetrates.

The Half-Hearted City

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By BOTHAYNA AL-ESSA
Translated from the Arabic by SAWAD HUSSAIN

(1)

In those days, everyone had the right to have feelings.
It was natural to feel things, and the right thing to do about your feelings was to make them known. Feelings were plenty, but broadly they were segregated into two groups: Love and Fear.
In those days, there was only one way you could sin: by faking your feelings.

A Pity

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By REBECCA FOUST

The creature was flushed from the snow
& flung like a tiny, limp footbag
before I could catch up to cup it below
my hands. While they collared the dog,

Invited

May 8, 2023 Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction

By SEAN BERNARD

The city overwhelmed us. We’d moved to it from a smaller part of the country, fairly rural, though it’s true that even rural parts of the country had by that time much in common with urban centers. In our small town there was a Walmart and high-speed internet and a bar that boasted craft beers from across the region. An intimate and well-known musical venue often featured prominent artists, and, as the woman I lived with always found loudness distasteful, I would attend these shows alone. Being at one, the gathered fans swaying together, made it easy for me to feel like there could be nowhere better. But also, circling the edges of the town, fields ran hundreds of miles in all directions, lush with the green stalks of corn and soy undulating over a landscape that, in winter, shriveled and turned dead, brown, and brittled.