Issue 9

Detail from Post Blue Six
By CAROLYN KUEBLER The closer they get to Wickersfield, the slower she wants to go. She’ll stay in the car and never get out, they can just keep driving, taking detour after detour until they are lost completely. With the roads torn up like this, Allison will not be to blame. We tried, she’ll say from a B&B somewhere in…
Protection
By PAOLA PERONI Last year, Antonio Greco committed suicide after attempting to kill his wife with a hammer. The doctors refused to speculate on the prognosis of his wife, hospitalized in critical condition. When we heard the news, I said I was only surprised Antonio had waited so long to try to kill Maria. My grandparents had employed Antonio as…
Lottery Ticket and Fuck All
By MICHAEL CATHERWOOD Guess I should forget to buy the lottery ticket every time I buy my generic cigs at the Get ’N Go. There’s no chance my get-rich dream will happen. Like to think that way though. I’m lucky at shit like that time I won a Sony boom box at my son’s little league all-the-trimmin’s baseball banquet. I still…
Midnight, and people I love are dying
By ROBIN CHAPMAN and I can’t sleep so I’m up thinking too hard scribbling these words in the dark because the physics science news I read before bed is making me crazy now with incomprehension—it makes no sense to me that gravity should exist, what I know about is love: that flaring up…
Storm
By WILL SCHUTT I After a shower I fill the tub with water, stick fresh candles into candlesticks and brace each heavy planter in the yard. From the rain guard gutter I rake leaves. Watching the sun press through shuttling clouds, I see there’s no such thing as reprieve without broad damage. Electricity comes and goes, yellow leaves circulate in…
Tiny Sun
By MARGOT DOUAIHY I always hide behind my hair, even when I don’t have hair. I disappeared inside my shaved head, identity de facto of college, coming out. Camouflaged in plain sight, a faux reveal, ersatz openness of skin & neck. But the locks grew back, as confused as I was. I keep inventing new ways to duck: my long…
On Being a Vine
By RAE PARIS for my niece, who got the part of a vine in The Secret Garden at her predominantly White school Your worried face wonders if you can do this. How does a vine think? What does it feel? Do vines own hearts, and if so do they beat fast or slow? What…
Basta
By SARA LONDON Stitch in Time is tired of saving Nine, weary of forever stepping up, peachy, alert and prissy, the reliable fixer, patcher, elbow- thigh-, knee-, ass- rescuer, savior swift with dowdy dexterity, steely purpose and doubling pep. Oh so tired of Time—the whispering vast, the winds’ splitting infinities, the centuries’ eruptions, feasts of error and woe. Stitch is dying…
The Post-Graduates
By PETER JAY SHIPPY We hung, chiefly, with actresses who read only the highlighted sections of scripts, we understood, better not to become too involved in narratives that might not love us, we derived great pleasure from that moment when a man trying to lay his hands on his hat found a fiery bowler…
Postcolonial Chicken
By JOHN MATTHIAS 1. Texts “When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit-roast.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses “I had also been given a roasted chicken.... But…
Hellgrammite Cloud
By GARY METRAS A cloud drifting over the house tonight is the shape of an insect, a hellgrammite, large, long, and singular, crawling through the waters of dark sky. Its pincers as real as anything as they search for sustenance, another bug, a just hatched rainbow trout wriggling in delicious currents along the belt…
Dante Or, The End of Poetry
By PATRICK PRITCHETT for Raul Zurita And he stirred his coffee, the old poet, and spoke of Dante, and how Homer’s journey to the underworld wove a thread through Virgil to the selva oscura. And that the Commedia was not the apex of Christianity, but its finale. That the enormous architecture of the poem was not built to house theology, but…
Between the Lines
By SUJATA SHEKAR The morning of the announcement, Bo Htet Aung finished his story. He wrote The End at the bottom of the page, shut the notebook, and slipped it into the briefcase he took to work each day. Then he set about ironing a white shirt and blue longyi with more than his usual precision. He wished he could…
God's Fingernail
By MASHA HAMILTON He brought her stories, long and intricate narratives that he laid at her feet like a dog with a bone. She would have preferred love, or at least more of his wild, open-hearted sex, but that was complicated; after all, she lived in another time zone now, and the divorce, far beyond messy, had left him in…
Leaving Walter
By LORI OSTLUND “Tell me what you want, Aaron,” Walter had periodically insisted, the words no longer an invitation but a way of chiding Aaron, suggesting that he wanted too much—or worse, that he had no idea what he wanted. In the beginning of their lives together, when they were two discrete people, Walter’s motives felt easy to read. :…
The Electric City
By KASHANA CAULEY We bought Detroit because even after buying ourselves new houses and cars, $253 million in lottery winnings left the four of us with a ton of leftover cash. Why specifically? One of our daughters found the ad on Craigslist: One city for sale or rent—slightly used; a fixer-upper; free from most city noise; lots of pretty, healthy trees and grass. The asking…
The Kindness of Strangers
By NONITA KALRA I am constantly asked why I persist in calling my city Bombay when it has long been renamed Mumbai. A rather articulate but annoying French academic even attributed inherent anarchy to my dissension. “If everyone called cities by the names they preferred, how would anyone know where they are?” I opted out of the argument. I would…
Papad
By SUKETU MEHTA Papad was the bard of the masses. He sat during the endless school classes on the bench next to me, composing rhymes which could be appreciated by all for their elemental simplicity. Thus: O dear Come near Don’t fear Have cheer Beer is here Or, still further atomized, each letter containing the whole of its Hindi word:…
I Went Sick as a Child
By ARSENY TARKOVSKY Translated by VALZHYNA MORT I went sick as a child with hunger and fear. I’d rip the crust of my lips—and lick my lips; I recall the fresh and salty taste. And I’m walking, I’m walking, walking, I sit on the steps by the door, I bask, I walk delirious, as if a rat catcher led me…
Mom's Dal
By NINA McCONIGLEY From the kitchen of Nirmala Swamidoss McConigley Handed down to her daughter, Nina McConigley Dal 1 cup of red lentils (washed well) 3–4 cups water 2 tbsp oil 1 onion 6–7 cloves garlic (cut in two) 1/4 tsp asafetida (sometimes called hing), you get this at Indian stores 1/4 tsp turmeric Jalapeño 1 tomato (add at the…
Pomfret Chutney Masala
By AMIT CHAUDHURI From the kitchen of Bijoya Chaudhuri Handed down to her son, Amit Chaudhuri Author’s note: I grew up in Bombay on my mother’s magnificent version of East Bengali food, a cuisine reinterpreted and perfected—and often added to with original recipes—by my grandmother in Sylhet and then my mother in her decades in Bombay. The recipe below is…
Bhel Puri
By JEHANGIR MEHTA From the kitchen of Chef Jehangir Mehta Bhel puri, a savory Indian snack or chaat, is a Bombay original. Serves 15 people. Ingredients Puffed rice 1qt Thin sev 1 qt Vegetables Red onions diced 1 cup Tomato diced 1 cup Cilantro chiffonade 1 cup Mint chiffonade 1/2 cup Red chilies chopped 2 Potatoes boiled diced 1 lb…
The Sense in Turning Away
By TEJU COLE She wrote: color is the sound an object makes in response to light. Objects don’t speak unless spoken to. An object does not have a color—it makes a color (the way a bell makes a sound). She wrote: People ask me if there could be another. People ask if I have considered another, if I am ready…
From Eidolon
By SANDEEP PARMAR xxii. ‘Ever the dim beginning’ [Whitman] Under the stucco and concrete plaza and its supermarket an unredeemable question before that an anxious crop of wheat before the wheat a rainproof dust that accumulated undisturbed over centuries— If as Freud suggests the mind is…
The Dictator's Bedroom
By ILEANA SELEJAN “The bunker was the reality of totalitarianism, its hideous remnant and reminder. The beheaded, violated, mutilated ghosts of Nicaragua bore witness, every day, to what used to happen here, and must never happen again.” —Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile In the early hours of July 17, 1979, Anastasio Somoza snapped shut the last of his suitcases, preparing…
What Always Pulls at Me (English & Spanish)
By LUIS MUÑOZ WHAT ALWAYS PULLS AT ME What always pulls at me, like a persistent hand tugging on my shirt sleeve or at my pant leg, is the poem I haven’t written. Hey, it asks me, when is it my turn? The blank code of my unwritten poem is inflated with announcements of what it could be and swagger.…
Poetry Never Stops Defining and Redefining Its Terrain (English & Spanish)
By LUIS MUÑOZ POETRY NEVER STOPS DEFINING AND REDEFINING ITS TERRAIN Poetry never stops defining and redefining its terrain. It has done so throughout history, since Aristotle, Cascales, or Antonio Minturno. But this task, which seems like a kind of prison sentence, is also a fountain of intensity, a force. Poetry is obligated to move, like a nomadic tribe. And…
The First Last Light in the Sky
By ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS That on the silent horizon, something Not a sunrise rose, half itself and half The horizon, dragging its bulk, its lights And salts, from under shifting sheets of sea, Leveling the sky into shallow moats Of sounds, flecks of birds, beginning again To believe all brief and sideways dreaming…
The Ice Hotel
By RICHARD MICHELSON I love you, I say, after the quarrel but before falling asleep. And within that small victory I can feel my chest muscles tightening, as my breath rises before me like a cartoon cloud awaiting the articulation of the storm. There is, my wife reminds me, a single degree where even ice, water and vapor can coexist;…
Some Proof of Love
By JACQUELYN POPE Dear little day later, Can’t you keep up? There is no going back so don’t insist. The view’s bound by the block, fenced for now but then will come and new alarms will set off and stop. Don’t wait to be whistled on. The leaves have left, and with eyes…
Bone Almanac
By JACQUELYN POPE That black telephone would ring and ring, fixed to its wall. It was a ring that roamed the mind, while night drummed down its list of last and lost events, circadian paths that tangled where they tried to pass, crossed and uncrossed hours. The body’d yield, caving in to sleep,…
The Common Statement
El Morro guards the northwestern tip of the old city, a headland with sparkling three-sixty views. Poised to fire cannons and guns against approaching sea invaders, the stone castle—six zigzagging levels, walls thick as hallways—was built by the Spanish starting in the early 1500s. El Morro protected Spain’s “porto rico,” the harbor crucial to any European empire seeking a…
Where Does the Time Go?
By AMIT CHAUDHURI My relationship with Joni Mitchell and her music moves through two stages. My early admiration for her—in the seventies—in some ways anticipated the zeitgeist. Then I stopped listening to her for about a quarter of a century. I began to rediscover Mitchell’s work in the new millennium, when, by coincidence, so was the rest of the world.…
Jesse Owens, Mr. Harris, and Me
By NINA McCONIGLEY This is how my mother tells it. Jesse Owens taught her to run. I am thirteen. I have just come back from track practice. I have no skill at anything athletic. But junior high for me has been a series of attempts to assimilate. That year in the yearbook, there isn’t a club I’m not in—Chess Club,…
The King of Bubbles
By EDIE MEIDAV Sinking lower in the club’s hot tub and today a birthday marks his face one notch less recognizable when anyway, meeting someone these days means who you say you are matters both less and more. Who cares, really? Get older and it becomes easier to say who you are not. No king of industry, that myth abandoned…
Audio: “Basta” by Sara London
Sara London reads her poem "Basta" from Issue 09 of The Common.
Yelabuga
By VALZHYNA MORT Maria does her washing by the wall so bare that you’d think she shaved it. The window’s open, anyone can see. Soap hisses. Air-raid warning rings like a telephone from the future. Her dress is nailed onto the laundry line. From this gray garment, that is either guarding or attacking the house, three yards of darkness fall across…
Two Flat Tires
KEVIN C. STEWART On the same side turn a car into a parallelogram, an oft-read Bible, a shelf of books with a few missing, a man sitting and a woman standing. Her hand is on his shoulder. His head lolls forward. Her feet are anxious. Kevin C. Stewart is the author of The Way Things Always Happen Here, a collection…