By MARIA JOSEP ESCRIVÀ
Translated by PETER BUSH
Who
Who has ever felt the shock of a brook
being sucked dry by the warm earth?
Who has ever felt the shock of the last
house falling apart in the mountains, mineral
corpse, stone by stone, bone by bone
of each man banished?
Winner of the DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
By IQRA KHAN
I begin as revelation. As explosion of glottal light against silence.
I am again asking for directions to the Haram, my ankles fluent in Arabic.
I am again asking for direction, ya Haram, my ankles flowing with Arabic!
Hagar, watch how God transforms this wilderness to civilization.
By ZACK STRAIT
There were other vehicles moving through the darkness behind us. But we didn’t notice. We forced our bodies into the brambles. We stood on our tiptoes, reached high above our heads like we were greedy for the stars that night. But we craved something attainable, we thought. We thought our need was for the wild summer blackberries. But we were foraging for another memory to sustain us through the evil days to come. And as we ate, the past ripened in clusters for us there among the thorns. I don’t know what my father thought about then, as we filled our bellies with those dark jewels, but I could almost taste my grandmother’s fruit cobbler. The blackberries, I remember, were perfect that night. They were plump and sweet. The juice didn’t stain our fingers or mouths. We ate and ate. How wonderful, how the earth offers such goodness to us without cost. And how awful.
By BOB HICOK
Caroline resembled moonlight.
She never appeared when it rained,
made the grass and broken windows
more beautiful, and had me wondering
if our love was waxing or waning.
Human systems exist in the mystery
always at the point of spilling
over green, over and over their present containers
of cities and grids and human perception
for what of entanglements, what of catastrophes
what of black holes, of soot from burnt timber
what of seashells, snails, urchins in the pavement
of ancient Greek settlements
“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
if other faculties are failing too…
like hearing, perhaps. A few seconds later,
though, we enjoy a breakthrough,
as our breezy, blow-dried commentator
re-airs his catchphrase, which I move to clarify
by relaying it slowly:
“Happy. And. Free.”
… At day’s end, even so, I might prefer
happy and furry, as though she
might yet retrieve days when all of us were
that peculiar entity, a big family—
father, mother, four boys of various
ages and stages—become, like any true family,
inhabitants of a lair,
wound and bound in a low common smell
(our own must of sweat and hair),
that familial furriness which cordons off a small
walled area while informing a potentially
invasive world, This is us.
Happy and furry. The woman’s five years dead,
yet just last week the phrase returned
as I, watching a YouTube clip, was shepherded
to an obscure nature site by a tag that posed
a teasing test: TRY NOT TO CRY AS MAMA CHIMP
MOURNS BABY. The test? Frankly, I’m not sure I passed.
Embarrassed, as if being watched, I felt
my eyes prickle as the blinking simian—so loving,
so darkly puzzled—stroked and stroked the silky pelt
of a torso strangely limp
whose russet fire still burned,
though warming neither the dead nor the living.
… Furry, then, if not free. We mishear,
misread, we go on misspeaking,
and if our errors pain us, soon they disappear
into an unseen, unseeable, ever-amassing crowd.
Click here. Click. Now. Always, the furious din out there,
and what do our answers count, everything so loud
and larger always than yesterday? We learn to chart
our growth by the billion-, trillion-fold:
Vaster, faster numbers. See me. Click. Give me your heart,
click. Like me…. So many voices, all seeking,
as I suppose both mothers were, the warm, the old,
the furred primordial lair.
Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poetry, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. A former theater critic for Time, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Still bleeding from birth
I looked up from you, daughter
your grandma was
shouting at me
in our hospital room
and I thought, enough
of this childhood pain
(an emancipation never
complete in my heart)
the next weeks your little fist
dimpling my breast was a
mere aesthetic
as she had not blessed me
I could not let her go
For the cherries from
Saturday’s market I used
a sharp coffee spoon
each bright heart-organ
hoards the clit of the fruit
I stabbed and extracted
hurting my thumb
sometimes I couldn’t get
all the meat off
you fetched a stool
each fruit, gravely chosen
now came lifted and pillowed
on your soft palm
then you drank all the juice
in the discard bowl
it ran down your chin
and onto the floor
I drained all the juices
from under the flesh and
you guzzled that too
Such gusto my dear
with each breath I bless you
go go go
Farah Peterson‘s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Magazine Writing, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review, and is forthcoming in the 2025 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Born in gilded fealty to the state, which was the people’s will,
which was the refined sugar of suffering and indifference,
which was the inherited burden of society, gift of the forefathers.
Bathed in cream, I transmuted hayricks into silk and mirrors.
I ate and destroyed, seeking relief from my depression.
By EDITH BRUCK
Translated by JEANNE BONNER
Poems appear below in English and the original Italian.
Translator’s Note
What I find indelible about Edith Bruck’s work is the subtle ways she introduces the topic of the Holocaust. A poem like “Pretty Soon” provides a glimpse of the author’s mindset – she managed to survive Auschwitz, and she hasn’t wasted a moment since her liberation as a teenager. She’s been incredibly prolific as a writer, and has traveled the world. But winning her freedom is an event forever married to the worst event ever: losing both of her parents in concentration camps. The challenge is to render that subtlety, which in the original is effortless. This is her life – it’s what she’s always known.
This thematic back and forth is also present in “There Were Eight of Us.” There were eight of us – but not anymore. One brother was swallowed up by the Holocaust, to use a phrase Bruck often employs in other work.
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By Li Zhuang, Cynthia Chen, Chen Du, Xisheng Chen, and Jolie Zhilei Zhou.
Table of Contents:
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.