Poetry | Page 33 | The Common

Enter Different Electronics (II)

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

35 Enter inhale. Enter time. Enter inheritance.
Enter or else. Enter doors with handles,
without handles, manually manipulated. Enter alone
feelings. Enter tension. Struggle entering
bitterness enter. Love turning towards lust enter.
Historic languages enter. Human conditions of
oppression enter. Enter roadside assistance. Enter
talented man killed too soon. Gravemarker write
L.O.W. Enter near Dayton settlement but
specifically at Englewood location. Enter chirping
bird sounds out of the ceiling again. Enter your
own music mixing up into the chirps of birds. Enter
memory again. Enter thought again. Enter more and
more gunshots. Enter yelling. Enter empathy and
critical engagement.

Kikawa

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By LANDA WO

The Common Magazine · Kikawa (Landa wo)

“Grief is never more than a house being rebuilt.”
Ntolle Mbuyi¹

Little Cabindan history
All the Cabindan strategies were there
To mount the portrait of a free Cabinda.

The historic chief discoursed on education
The Cabindan earth sketched a faint smile.

The Couple

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By KC TROMMER

Louise Bourgeois, MASS MoCA

Inside the bounded mercury,
we keep going. All circuits that close
make serpents of us, constrict
and envelop every tender corner until
only a small portion
is distinct, our feet dangling like the end of a
sentence. We suspend ourselves
in a room full of light but take none in.

Building

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By KANYA KANCHANA

“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters.
Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
taller far than a tall man.”
—Sappho

A brief architectural brief

The Streets are Effulgent

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Translation

By JOÃO LUÍS BARRETO GUIMARÃES

Translated by CALVIN OLSEN

to Alexandra and Ricardo
on the arrival of Gui

We all have credit,
Said the bankers.
A matter of faith.
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Gródek

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By BRUCE BOND

When the smoke cleared and took with it the sirens
and the uniforms strung across our sofas,

what remained were rivers, mist, whisper as a habit,
red dawn in the eyes of the sleep-deprived.

In the brush, here and there, beside the highway,
the revenant scent of metal and decay.

Provincetown

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ
Winner of the 2020 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack
as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,

not black rock or islands of fog rising individual
in a barrenness of salt. It is not that

The Rower of the Maré

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Translation

By ELIANE MARQUES
Translated by TIFFANY HIGGINS

To Marielle Franco, city councillor, sociologist, and activist in Black and LGBTQI+ movements, who was assassinated along with her driver Anderson Gomes in Estácio in the middle of Rio de Janeiro on March 14, 2018. Those who ordered the crime have not yet been brought to justice.

We are full of bullets from AKs in our heads and in our necks
With stray slugs that enter our bones our backs
We are in the Ecstasy neighborhood
But not dying of love

The Jews of Kaifeng

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By ADRIENNE SU

When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center,
the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown.
Jews had been in Henan so close to forever,
they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had found
an exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases.
Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.
Migration was not always out of the places
our families had fled; it had once been to.
Our pantries were “ethnic” not just for the shrimp chips
and wood ears, but as well for the matzah.
Maybe, when asked, Do you celebrate Christmas?,
we were not being checked for Zen or the Buddha.
We didn’t say it in so many words.
The line between Asia and Europe had blurred.

Pow-Wow at Thomas Square

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By DELAINA THOMAS

Honolulu

I walk to the park
drummers sit in a circle under a white tent
they have drifted this far way on pacific waves
long feathers tucked behind their ears
they sweat in soft fringed hides
their faces lean and dark