Issue 2

From the Windows of the Kew Lunatic Asylum
By SUSAN KINSOLVING The view excavated any hope of escape. “Ha ha!” the trench, that sunken fence, seemed to say with its furrows dug deep enough for despair.   Though from the other side, the public saw swept views, open expanses, a landscaped guise. The asylum appeared to be a place of liberty! But between normalcy and its aberrant neighbor,…
The Fashion of La Folie
By SUSAN KINSOLVING 1754 She insisted that a gazebo, grotto, and gate be added to the Estate. Two obelisks were next. And soon, a sham castle was built on adjoining land. Then she planned a Greek temple for a statuesque Aphrodite and six water-spouting nymphs. Plus, a pagoda! Her follies were, as Lord Clark said, monuments to mood. But…
Pvt. William O. Walker Recalls Walter Reed Army Hospital: Eye, Ear, & Nose Unit, 1947
By SUSAN KINSOLVING Motto: We Provide Warrior Care  The war was over. The only thing to kill was time. And memory. Looking in a mirror, a G.I. wondered why. Whether to laugh or cry, he had to face his future with a new face, one that would be recomposed with an acrylic eye, a rubber ear, a grafted nostril, or…
Ambroise Paré
By SUSAN KINSOLVING A war surgeon, he saw all losses: life being the larger part; limbs the lesser. Legs hanging from trees; on the field, hands disarmed. Teeth missing; toes afloat in a bucket of blood. A competent carpenter, he sawed and drilled, pulled with pliers, hammered and hacked. Much symmetry was skewed, gaps and gapes, the glaring absence of…
Ludwig Josef Johan
By ARKADY DRAGOMOSHCHENKO Translated by THOMAS EPSTEIN Wittgenstein’s been in paradise for a while now. He’s probably delighted Because the surrounding rustle reminds him That the rustling that surrounds him does not speak of, Is not an example of that which must be “shown.” It’s agonizing, because he can’t remember some sentence. Upsetting too, because reason is in no condition…
Original
By JACQUELYN POPE Girl when you get lost the forest will find you tame you take you over. Pocket of breadcrumbs and birdsong. Pocket of rocks.   The ends of town the noise of home are lost where you go digging down and out and under furrowed in mud and stone. When you rise and run remember the good black…
Cries and Whispers
By MAJOR JACKSON Each day I forget something, but happy I never forget to wake to the bright corollas of summer mornings. I quietly lay in the jury box of my bed and listen to the counter-arguments of birds grow to sweet clamors. I know, like me, someone sitting at a kitchen table in my neighborhood is taking down notes…
Special Needs
By MAJOR JACKSON Only the skin runs ahead like a spruced-up dream from which I never awake. What really exists, no one knows. In exchange for shook foil, Hopkins killed the agnostic in him. I want to kill the polygamist in me. I am most me in an alley off Market Street where I pretend to be homeless and a…
Paired Leaves
By JENNIFER HABEL I have not been refined in the furnace of affliction as some have been, but have rather been preserved with sugar than brine. . . . —Anne Bradstreet  From three thousand feet the bee smells flowers. Milkweed thick with them in the west field. If I am glad the sun is down (no reds, no purples), the…
California
By CRALAN KELDER During this past visit to California, I visited a friend who has been incarcerated since 1985 – for 25 years. In prison, he isn’t allowed to physically handle money, so when we take a break from walking laps around the visiting room and get in line by the vending machines to treat ourselves to hot drinks, he…
Boys
By CRALAN KELDER when the boys came over theo with his banjo david brought his voice we set some poems to music berrigan’s Train Ride & the one about his old house that he would miss and the one that got to me was Letters from Vicksburg, Civil War sonnets, true stories, transcribed by Gildner in which the boy who…
Religion
By CRALAN KELDER either you feel it or you don’t and I don’t feel a thing, nothing at all, except I do feel a great warmth standing in the window in the front of the sun and I think how fucking great it is to be alive I could almost cry standing there watching the trees pollinating each other and…
Tattoo
By ROSANNA OH As you undo the cuff links in your shirt, the waiter taps me on the shoulder and tells me that we are the last customers. Your fish is cold. I am waiting in the restaurant, thinking you have gone to piss— instead, I order dessert as you press yourself against the sink, scratching at my name, scouring…
Miss Ohio Teaches You to Drive
By CORINNA MCCLANAHAN SCHROEDER Follow the serpentine river roads toward the Little Miami’s lip. Pass through the sycamore trunks, their whitewashed limbs. See how they molt their skins. These are curves I can still ride harder than a man’s hips, roads my parents never knew I drove. Feel that wind, saturated, undercut with vespertine chill. Let it frizz your hair.…
Survivor
By JACQUELYN POPE Whatever possessed you pursues me. Whatever unnerved you sings me to sleep, repeats and repeats, insists. Whatever composed you constricts me. Where you were bright I was blind. Whatever you saved I’ve squandered. Where you were soft I was scabbed. Whatever consoled you confuses me, retreats and retreats, insists. Whatever the heart wills, hands divide. Wherever the…
Macario
By JUAN RULFO Translated by ILAN STAVANS and HAROLD AUGENBRAUM I’m sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out. Last night, while we were having dinner, they started kicking up a huge ruckus and didn’t stop singing until dawn. That’s what my godmother says, too: that the frogs’ shouting scared her sleep away. And she’d like to…
The Smuggler
By KATIA KAPOVICH Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV I wore the same checkered coat for six winters in a row. It had once been warm and even elegant in its way, but then developed holes and faded. Whether because the cotton lining had become matted or because the outer cloth had worn thin from wind and rain, the garment no longer…
Zijnstra Inc.
By HESTER KNIBBE Translated by JACQUELYN POPE In love everything is possible. You doggedly paper a tree with roses and say: this was the place and everyone who passes should  know it. Or someone decides: this deadweight can’t be lifted any longer, I’ll set it like stone at the foot of the cliff, but it doesn’t make walking or breathing…
Figurine
By TIMOTHY WATT Long ago I found myself in a dark wood wandering, a tale-teller with no tale to tell. How I’d come to be in that place, I don’t know. I was there shivering, empty, trying and failing to remember the tales I’d told, in times past, in ages before. I couldn’t remember any of them, much as I…
Eclipse
By TOM SLEIGH for Tayeb Salih and Binyavanga Wainana  Heat lightning flicking between head and heart and throat makes me hesitate: I could see in the rear view one part of the story while up ahead the crowd breaking into riot  were throwing rocks at one another as the soldiers retreated into a doorway. The whole thing comes back like…
Birds
By JESSIE MARSHALL The club’s house mother—we’ll call her Cheryl—didn’t think I dressed sexy enough. I had purchased three slinky outfits in Camden Market, two red and one black, for less than thirty quid each. They weren’t slutty exactly, but came off quickly and showed a lot of skin. Cheryl made her own dresses and sold them for ninety pounds,…
Cradle Song
By CODY WALKER You’re just a baby, And as such, may be Susceptible to lies (And wonder, and surprise):  Left is hither, Hither is yon, Santa Claus has a Santa mask on; Right is backwards, Backwards is broken; Baby’s first words go unspoken: You’re just a dad— Spark-lit and sad— And I’m you,…
The Long Gone Daddies
From The Long Gone Daddies By DAVID WILLIAMS The night doesn’t ask much, my daddy used to say, a whiff of gas and a working radio. Come dark, he said, you can pull in ancient sounds from hundreds of miles away – blue stomps from the big cities, lick-skillet country come down from the hills and up from the hollows,…
Lions
By TOM SLEIGH At Show and Tell, in front of the whole class, the cubs’ jaws yawned wider than the boa constrictor’s that bolted down the lethargic, pink-eyed mouse— how they’d nuzzle and lean into our stroking... But when genetics took over, their cells didn’t care if they grew up in someone’s basement or were teething  out on the Masai…
Gemology
By MARIE GAUTHIER They hack their way through the wild kingdom of the back yard while she alights on a chair, her book unopened on the grass, more rest for her glass than her eyes, which follow to foil: spoiled moods, spilled blood, numinous harms yet undreamt. Bronze-headed boys goldenrod-tall, hunched-over treble clefs, they dig pockets into the dirt, rummage…
Geometry
By MARTHA COOLEY LINES An urban garden-party in spring, at dusk. The light waning, the air mild, the walled garden compact but lush. A cat slinks along one flower-bed’s edge. Guests arrive singly and in couples; they pass through the brownstone’s ground floor to the patio at the back, exchanging handshakes and cheek-kisses as they meet. Their voices generate a…
Many Desires, Many Secrets
By TOM SLEIGH 1. Many desires, many secrets—that’s what the book said. And it brought me to attention, watching the interior branches of the pine trees swaying in a paranoid whisper that reminded me of you standing over me, your hand in my hand, your mind not right but your whispering rebelling against that hissing shhhh of what I couldn’t…
Function of Water
By NATHANIEL PERRY On rainy days the place seems smaller, acres still ringed and shrouded by trees, but the sky is closer, like something landing. I know you’d like to ask me—please  can we go inside, it’s cold, I’m cold, the baby’s cold—but you know I won’t let you go inside yet. The boy is shrieking as if the colors…
How To Perform a Tracheotomy
By HOLLIE HARDY The first thing you need to know is that the tracheotomy  is an act of desperation and/or violence that should only be  committed when there is no other option. SOME CIRCUMSTANCES WHEN IT MIGHT BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM A TRACHEOTOMY:  The victim is choking on a thin mint and is unresponsive to the “hind-lick” maneuver. The victim…
Elisha in the River
From Spider In A Tree By SUSAN STINSON Elisha Hawley turned nine years old six weeks after his father had laid violent hands on himself and cut his own throat. Rebekah, Elisha’s mother, made apple flummey seasoned with cinnamon and ginger for breakfast and let him have the last of the bacon with pea soup for supper. She made doughnuts, despite…
While Our Father Was Hunting Rocks
By ELIZABETH HAZEN Mountains rise beyond the Laundromat like ochre waves about to crash; our father, armed with tools and pack, tracks the rocks without a map. Here, the Laundromat is all in a strip of vacancies; for miles, nothing but dirt, dust, outcrop, sky. Our mother gives  us coins to clink in the machine; it gushes cold, foams with…
How to Jump From a Building into a Dumpster
By HOLLIE HARDY Come home from a Tupperware party. Look out across the lake and imagine the feel of your tongue against the truth. Prevent the neighbor’s dog from barking. Try to find the unselfconsciously erotic person hiding within.  Refuse to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Be the old man carrying flowers on his head. Be life-like. Think…
Frond
By DANIEL TOBIN It could be on a card, tucked away somewhere buried In a drawer under tools, the keys to doors Left long behind, folded like a phone number Into the black book of forgotten friends—the name Of that plant, tropical lenient frond we keep By the window for light in our kitchen, each broad leaf When young untwisting…
Land Rush
By STEPHEN HAVEN Each evening my half-coon hound dog buries her snout In her foul dish then comes up singing, moans, complains About her condition, until I hook her up, let her shit And piss among the graves—who’s watching, anyway?— The groundskeepers all home by then, their evening shows Just flickering, the trees along the forested edge Leaning as always…
El mundo al revés/The World Upside Down
By ILAN STAVANS and TERESA VILLEGAS SACA LA PATA/THE REVERSAL Un pájaro puso a su dueño en una jaula. “Nuestros papeles se han invertido”, dijo el pájaro. “¡Quiero que cantes!” El dueño se quejó: “Pero yo no sé cantar”. “No importa”, gritó el pájaro. El dueño silbó pero claramente no tenía ningún ritmo. “Prefiero que bailes ante mí”. El dueño…
Parasitical
By DANIEL TOBIN Despite having no lungs and unable to breathe, the second head displays signs of independent consciousness….   The first fiction is I’m talking to you at all, the more amorphous of my own Janus head, the god alive and compassing what has gone and what is coming, though which is which is hard to say. Did I…
Death in an Art Deco House
By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTA Fortysomething, slight of build, he lived next door with his parents in an Art Deco house with garden to match and tall trees that came up to my third floor flat from where I could touch their leaves. Squirrels ran up and down them all day, squeaking.  In a city he grew up in, which he’d never…
The Sting in the Tail
By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTA Wearing loose clothes, light cottons, you sit and fan yourself with a newspaper supplement, a glass of tepid fennel-flavoured sherbet by your side.  From the window you see a car turn, a bus pass, or a cyclist, a towel wrapped round his head. It’s forty-five degrees centigrade in the shade, and according to the forecast there’s worse…
The Net
By DANIEL TOBIN Translated loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet discovered among the ruins of Kush.  God of the first waters, Ea, listen, You who parsed chaos with a net from the day: Unfasten your knots, let the swells replenish From subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh. The galaxies circuit in their bright delay. The least wind tempts me…
Ingres at the Morgan
By ESTHER BELL From September 9 to November 27, 2011, The Morgan Library & Museum presents seventeen exquisite drawings and some letters by French master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In this issue, The Common publishes four drawings from the exhibition. Read an interview between editor Jennifer Acker and curator Esther Bell about these drawings and the artist's refined sense of place here.…