NEW POETS for the NEW YEAR
Please welcome Holly Burdorff, John Davis Jr., Nicholas Friedman, and Matt Salyer—four poets who are new to our pages, and welcome back TC contributor Tina Cane, the new Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.
New poems from our contributors: please welcome newcomers to The Common, Mik Awake and Elizabeth Scanlon, and welcome back L. S. Klatt and Ben Mazer.
This month’s feature includes new work by contributors.
By DENISE DUHAMEL & JULIE MARIE WADE
Adult Supervision Recommended
When your partner comes home with you for the first time, try to prepare her. Explain how they still see you as a child: cake and candles, streamers and balloons, bubblegum and colored pencils as parting gifts. Though you’re twenty-three, your father insists, “You won’t be grown up in my book until I’ve walked you down the aisle.” Expect jokes about Clinton’s impeachment and Hillary’s headbands. Anticipate talk of bootstraps—how “some people” have never learned to pull themselves up. On the refrigerator, George and Laura Bush grin inside a heart-shaped magnet. The radio plays Rush Limbaugh all afternoon.
By KEVIN O’CONNOR
Strange you came onto me at Children’s Mass,
standing in back, minding my unbelief,
as Thomas doubted physical return.
By ROBERT BAGG
We go through life regretting our mistakes.
One savage quip that can’t be taken back,
one breach of a friend’s trust is all it takes
to wrench a lifelong friendship out of whack.
By KAREN CHASE
See the trace of someone’s hand
in the shorn branches, the tangle
of trees past the flat lawn.
Translated by LOREN GOODMAN
In my town there’s a big rock
called Tum Ab’aj.
The sun and the moon take care of it.
My friend with the brain tumor—a grisly glioma
Surgeons can’t get to the bottom of—that on one side
Of his head presses transmitters on the other, hears
A constant, streaming waterwheel of voices and music,
Slopping pails drawn up from who knows where
Each of us has reservoired it all—the dreamhorde,
The broadcasts, bunny hops, back seat schmoozing,
Nixon’s re-election bid, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,”
Cheap café tunes with dummy lyrics, traffic reports,
By TIMOTHY LIU
Her hands kept on
working their way
into my pants even
after the wedding
toast—the evening
merely an excuse
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Celebrating 15 Years