Poetry | Page 59 | The Common

June 2017 Poetry Feature

June 30, 2017 Poetry

Over the past year Vievee Francis has received well-deserved recognition for her latest collection, Forest Primeval, which won both the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award. Her previous book, Horse in the Dark, won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, and her first, Blue-Tail Fly, preceded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Since the publication of Forest Primeval, Francis has been working on a fourth collection, and at The Common we’ve had the honor and the pleasure of presenting some of her new poems: “On Leaving the Mountains and Coming to the City I Thought I Left For Good” and “The Beauty of Boys Is” appear in Issue 13, Spring 2017, and “This Morning I Miss Such Devotion” is forthcoming in Issue 14, Fall 2017. Here is “’Moan Soft Like You Wanted Somebody Terrible,’” our Poetry Feature for the month of June.

May 2017 Poetry Feature

May 26, 2017 Poetry

This May, we’re celebrating spring with new work by three of our contributors.

STEVE BARBARO

Flavored Graffito

Agrigento, Sicily

Piz-stack-eee-oh, Graffito registers, the word flooding his noggin

like the weed-choked shrubs crowding what should-be-a-more-

pregnant vacuity surrounding what little remains of Demeter’s

Twenty Minutes at the Clam Shack

April 30, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By CASSIE PRUYN

Beneath a chalk-white winter sky,
her diamond studs gleam.
We sit parked in the Clam Shack lot, halfway
between her house and mine,
in her mother’s luxury SUV. Her alibi this time:
Christmas shopping for her mother on Newbury Street.

Lesson for Cortney

April 30, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON

after Lewis Holt

Those are traffic lights. They help stop people from
driving into each other. That’s a crescent moon and star
on top of that building. It means the people inside are part
of The Nation. That’s a gas station. That’s a McDonald’s.
That’s a Burger King. That’s a fried fish and chicken joint.

The Hotel Belvedere

April 26, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By MARY JO SALTER

A June day under the Jungfrau.

Near the railway that brought her here,

an old woman sits on a bench.

She isn’t facing the Jungfrau

but the Hotel Belvedere

Two Poems in the Courtly Manner

April 25, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Gather ye rosebuds come what may,

Old time’s a frequent flyer,

And many lovers that link today

May soon be forced to retire.

Let each of us have one, each of us be one

Soul unlinking from its mate in the past

To eat the golden apples of the sun.

Youth fondly supposes it will last.

April 2017 Poetry Feature

April 23, 2017 Poetry

At The Common, we’re celebrating Poetry Month with new work by five of our contributors.

JAMES HOCH

Fayum Portrait [Deal]

I’ve sent a map on wax paper–
What he loves arrayed as clumsy petals.
If it arrives,
someone will ink it in his back,
so it will go with him
like a paw stuffed in a casing,
boardwalk mojo to ward off the hail of RPG, AK,

FOB after FOB, Amputee Ward, TBI, Arlington.

We’ll Always Have Parents

April 22, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By MARY JO SALTER

It isn’t what he said in Casablanca

and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless

we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.

March 2017 Poetry Feature

April 20, 2017 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

At The Common we’re welcoming spring with new poetry by our contributors. (Be sure to listen to the audio link to Megan Fernandes’ “White People Always Want to Tell Me…,” read by the author.)