“Made of cotton Jeans, red cotton cord
and one cotton tassel. Price, each $5.00″
—from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Inside the discourse, our course—the walk
in the tattle, the footwork goose stepped
Dedicated to Reina Yolanda Burdie
I was in Egypt nine months before the towers fell.
The people spoke to me in Arabic Roh Rohi
but I spoke back in English so they called me “American”
/I never called myself American.
America never called me American – not without a hyphen.
At an artists’ collective near the Polish border about an hour from Berlin, I’d been taking a break from translating texts into English, a task I once enjoyed but was beginning to resent, as I was beginning to feel invisible—or was it burnt out?—in any case, I was glad to get away for a few days: it was my first vacation since I-don’t-know-when, and I’d begun to feel my soul was spent. Over lunch on my last day there, a woman from Seoul who went by the nickname Hae—a transliteration of the word “sun” in Korean, she said—asked what the word in German was for “soul.” Actually, the woman sitting next to her asked, but the woman sitting next to Hae came from Spain and was shy about her English, so when she directed the question at me I heard the word as “sol”—we’d spent the week speaking both Spanish and English—and said, in reply, “Sonne.”
By MARCI CALABRETTA CANCIO-BELLO
You tried so hard to be good, turning
the shower on when no one was home,
brushing your teeth so inaudibly
that even standing in the hall with an ear
pressed to wood, no one could hear you.
The sun could not freckle through you,
but each morning you pressed your palms
against the wallpaper as if you might
one day slip right through into daylight.
Once, you went so long without laughing
you forgot how to start altogether.
You watched one scary movie per year
to insist you knew how to be brave,
because you knew you weren’t
transparent enough to pass through
when those hands came spoiling at night.
Make the house leaves. Make the windows impenetrable.
I will climb from underground with my dry bark heart
still pulsing for you
Translated from the Spanish by HEATHER HOUDE
It’s the last day of school, and I get home with butterflies in my stomach. My mouth already tastes like summer, like heat outside and air conditioning inside, like the darkness of my cave, like cloister and crypt. I turn on the television and change the channel, change the channel, one to the next, discovering the lineup for the beginning of the end of the week, the beginning of my three-month rest, the beginning of a new wave of televised hunger, the same that ensues from another year of school.
Power, which hides what it can
—George Oppen
1/
A kind of hangar by the mall.
Propulsive dance hits
looped like the 80s never ended—
B-b-b-b-b-baby, I-I-I-I can’t wait…
Everybody wants to let go, but how do you let go if you
don’t hold things?
—Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest
Red draws their tiny eye, and every hummingbird
feeder you can buy blooms a plastic, stoic
ruby, effigy of flower, tadasana of red. Already
they have eaten me out of sugar, but forgetful today
December evenings, his wife and daughter would linger at the kitchen window to watch the deer come down their switchbacks. There was a stand of chinkapins. The deer would prize the nuts from the urchin-shaped husks. He can see his wife leaning over the sink. His daughter on a stool beside her.
He once cherished this time of year. Days of red sumac and rime, days when the rock walls along the mountain parkway bared swags of gray ice. The rhododendron would curl up like tubes, near blue. Everything on the hillsides would be exposed, including the deer. He sees them standing there still, two images of each other across time, their red aprons on, matching bows at the back of their waists, watching the deer. Such a small, true pleasure, to watch something wild and vulnerable. He rides along the parkway, heading home, knowing his wife and daughter will not be there. He watches the roadbed for ice, for rocks that broke free in the first hard frost. It’s an old habit, the way a parent drives, wary of any threat.
By ANU KUMAR
For nearly two years of my life, I lived with a ghost. It was when my father, a civil servant, was posted in Sambalpur, a now forgotten town in northern Odisha, a state in India’s east. Newspapers then, and even now, always added the descriptor “India’s poorest state” whenever Odisha made the headlines. This happened in the late 1980s, when several hunger-related deaths were reported in a tribal-dominated district in the state’s west, and a decade later, after an Australian missionary was burnt to death, along with his two sons, by a group led by a Hindu fanatic.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.