Poetry | Page 79 | The Common

White Mountain

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

I slept in the shadow of White Mountain

but around the high temples of the mountaintop

beyond the silvery bonnet of eternal snow

I could see wreaths of light shivering

If I Should Tell You

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

If I should tell you they come to this place,
those who’d written out their lying lives, that they move
languidly yet deft like butterflies, one by one they come,
a movement in the penumbra, each with a shimmering
shield or carapace on the back stretching from neck
to the fold of the knees,

Borderlands, or Where is the Source of Corruption? (Touch of Evil)

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JON THOMPSON

“as the camera moves
through the streets of the Mexican border town
the plan was to feature
a succession of different and contrasting
Latin American musical numbers—

Snow as Versions of Different Things (Fargo)

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By JON THOMPSON

desire
In the flat uninhabited spaces, snow falls from an empty sky. Here and there, the bare branches of an oak are black against the steadily-falling flakes. When the air is thick with them, it’s not white, exactly, but a glowing bluish-white, shading to grey as evening comes on, darkness in tow. Snow accumulates like loneliness, one snowfall covering the last one, layering into snowdrifts that become the landscape.

Monhegan

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By PEGGY O’BRIEN

1. goose girl

I’m chatting away merrily to his back
About how my grandmother worked here
As a nursemaid. Little changes
On an island. Look, a goose girl
In a floppy bonnet, charges honking.

Ode to my Father

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By DENISE DUHAMEL

Man who gave all the benefit of the doubt,
man of beer and doughnuts, man of wieners and maple syrup,
sweet-toothed man, man of the one-liner,

April 2013

April 23, 2013 Poetry

New poems from our print contributors in the U.S. and abroad.

March 2013 Poetry Feature

March 23, 2013 Poetry

This month’s poetry feature showcases work from new books by our contributors.

The Hours

February 22, 2013 Poetry

By PETER FILKINS

Matins

in the indicative dark
somber houses
stand preoccupied

From In the Time of Rat

January 25, 2013 Poetry

By NORMAN LOCK

The Common is pleased to present the opening pages of Norman Lock’s book-length poem, In the Time of Rat, which will be published by Ravenna Press this winter (2013). In a “narrow measure” muscular as Skelton’s but with the wit, precision, and grace of bonsai, Lock delivers the story of Nicolaas Jansen, “soldier/deserter,” insurgent subject and celebrant of Rat. Not since Ted Hughes’ Crow have we encountered a figure with this much disturbing gravity and charisma, and Rat is the more cunning and mercurial of the two. By the book’s end he has become God’s mimic and shadow, double to soldier and state, patron and incarnation of the impulse to war, that force relentlessly “turning/ what is human into/ meat.”