Fog

By RUSTUM KOZAIN

4 a.m. Streets under fog. Streetlights gone.
Except a few down the road
and the moon’s halo
easily obscured by a plume of breath

laced with nicotine
and the meagre consolation of the last round
from the last open bar
now closed, and its glow also gone.

From the bay, a foghorn.
A long, low note from watch’s end
as if a moan from Leviathan
cast down into despair by its god.

From a rank doorway, a cry in counterpoint.
A homeless man
swaddled in his nightmares,
the abject of the rich man’s dreams.

Not one lone car carrying young lovers
drunk and eager, warm
between their legs and their hope,
their cold, misfiring hope

that after the revving and keening,
after the splutter home
after the many beers souring the breath
tonight’s love will remain.

There is no God now as lonely as these streets,
this grid empty
like love’s chessboard at game’s end;
or a labyrinth

through which comes a beast loping,
comes loping a big, forlorn dog,
its black coat matte with condensation.
And behind it from the mist emerges a man

on a walk at tangent to the world and time.
The dog loops back to him
to brush at his legs, sniff at his feet.
Then heels like a dutiful companion

at a soft ghost of a chide
as back into the fog they fade
past the last lights down the road,
a man and his black dog.

 

 

Rustum Kozain‘s poetry has been published in local and international journals, some in translation in French, Spanish, and Italian.

Click here to purchase Issue 04

Fog

Related Posts

cover of HEIRLOOM

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Her eye-less eye. My long / longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered / hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments. / To exist at all. A comfort. / A gutting. String her up then, / figurine on the cot mobile. / And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

VIJAYALAKSHMI
There is fire everywhere, / both inside and outside. / Unaware of the intensity of the fire, / they maintain silence / like the serenity of a corpse. / From the burning fire / bursts out a waterfall tainted in red. / All over the shores have bloomed / the flaming lilies of motherhood.

Gray Davidson Carroll's headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Gray Davidson Carroll on “Silent Spring”

GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing.