“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.
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
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…
New poems by our contributors: JOHN FREEMAN, KEETJE KUIPERS, and JOSEPH O. LEGASPI.
Table of Contents:
John Freeman | “Borrowed Finery”
Keetje Kuipers | “Washing My Daughter’s Clothes”
| “I didn’t know what I didn’t know”
Joseph O. Legaspi | “Longyi, a Lyric”
Poems by BLERINA ROGOVA GAXHA, DONIKA DABISHEVCI, and VLORA KONUSHEVCI.
Translated from the Albanian by VLORA KONUSHEVCI.
Poems appear below in both Albanian and English.
Translator’s note
The Albanian language is one of the oldest languages in Europe, although its written form appears rather late in the historical record, sometime in the mid-fifteenth century. It occupies an independent branch of the Indo-European language tree; hence it is considered an isolate within that language family, with no kin conclusively linked to its branch. It is believed to be the descendant of Illyrian, but this hypothesis has been challenged by some linguists, who maintain that it derives from Dacian or Thracian. However, to this day there is no scholarly consensus over its ascendant, and it is still a subject of scientific debate.
Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022) and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her recent poems have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry series, and elsewhere. Among other honors, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents:
This month we welcome back TC contributor NATHAN McCLAIN, whose new collection, Previously Owned, will be published by Four Way Books next month.
Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry—Scale (2017) and Previously Owned (2022)—both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, Zocalo Public Square, The Critical Flame, and the Plume Poetry Anthology 10. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Where the View Was Clearer
Had I not chosen to live there—
among the oaks and birches,
trees I’d only ever seen in poems
until then…spruce, pine,
among the jack-in-the-pulpit
(though I much preferred “lady slipper”),
Poems by JUAN DE DIOS GARCÍA
Translated from the Spanish by CORY STOCKWELL
Poems appear below in both English and Spanish.
Translator’s Note
Moments are the most intimate of entities. If I had to distill Juan de Dios García’s already vast body of work into a single line, a single thought, it would be this one. The relevance will be clear for the two poems published by The Common, site-specific prose poems taken from a longer series all having to do with places in García’s native Cartagena, Spain. It is a commonplace that poems capture moments, but how to achieve this at a time when places come more and more to resemble one another, and moments, as a result, seemingly lose their attachments to specific sites? For García, the answer does not lie in the obvious gesture, which would be to try to arrest the site in time—to describe it in detail, to focus on its qualities and characteristics, to insist on its uniqueness. On the contrary: what defines a site, for García, is a sort of double insistence, an insistence on two claims that seem—but only seem—to contradict one another: anything could happen at this site; this could only happen at this site. When writing of a poetry reading at the Mister Witt Café in the poem of this name, García is undoubtedly recalling a specific evening, a specific reading, a specific poet who has entered into an almost rapturous state. And yet everything is entirely different for me when, the next day, in the wake of this poet who is at once elusive and resolutely public, I have my morning coffee at this very café, not inside (in the décor that would seem to evoke a certain Chinese pavilion in Lisbon) but on the terrace, or rather—since there is no terrace to speak of, only sleek tiles that blend into the tiles that make up the street of this coastal city in which all distinctions between inside and outside become untenable—at a table placed almost haphazardly near the door. The same goes for the Parque de la Rosa, through which I stroll later that day, under an unfortunate wide-brimmed hat: there is no strange woman who sees me cry, who strokes my skin and sees in me things that I cannot see myself; there is, however, a small black dog who hurtles toward me unthreateningly, playfully, veering off at the last minute toward a young couple whose scent he has picked up. It almost goes without saying that to translate these poems—to pass through the haunts of this poet—is in no way to betray them, but simply to add another layer to what they have already expressed, another moment to the moment they give forth; it is to locate a meaning that can only belong to these places and can only be completely different from all the meanings that came before. Moments, for Juan de Dios García, are the most extimate of entities.
— Cory Stockwell
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