The Common: Issue 19

A special portfolio of stories from Sudan, essays on brothers and murder trials, fiction about gender roles, bomb shelters, and life inside a correctional facility, and poems by Don Share, John Freeman, Tara Skurtu, and more.

Counsel
DAVID MOLONEY I work alone on the Restricted Unit in the Barker County Correctional Facility in New Hampshire. It’s a semicircular room, the curved wall lined with nine cells. Most of the day, the inmates press their faces to scuffed windows, silent. There are no bars.
Epithalamium
EMILY LEITHAUSER The morning after we decided not to get engaged / (I’d ridden the streetcar alone; / I felt purposeful and ashamed, my mouth stained with wine) / I sat down in the shower and wept / into the crook of one elbow, my arms folded over, / as the shampoo ran down my breasts / and spine.
The Infidel and the Devil
MOHAMED BADAWI HIGAZI Not many of us knew Sharif. He had been gone from the village for more than thirty years, and the few times his name came up, the person in question would glance around and lower their voice almost to a whisper. Men’s heads would cluster together in brief and hasty conference.
Selections from Sudan
THE HINDIYEH MUSEUM OF ART Selections from Sudan, courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum Of Art in Jordan, exhibits a distinguished collection of contemporary Arabic art from the start of the 20th century to the present, with frequent new acquisitions from established and emerging artists.
From Tanaga
DON SHARE and JOHN KINSELLA The cicadas come every… / How many years? The cycles / Are all fucked up now. Even / Insects know the end is near. / The emerald ash borer looks / Like a jewel; its value / Lies in destructiveness to / Species—ours—that feed on ash.
The Dodo
LESLIE MCGRATH When she sheds / her last moony / red potential / a woman sheds / also obligation / (insert obligation / elsewhere) / fading from / lure to lore. / Thus woman disappears twice. / The dodo’s gone. / Too lame to fly / too plentiful / to protect too / delicious to deny.
Notebooks of Maladies
EMAD BLAKE The oldest boys in the neighborhood—“bullies,” as our Egyptian neighbors would say—chased that boy… chased me. I’d long been obsessed with watching Egyptian TV shows and films, sneaking into the cinema to see them because in our house it was forbidden… “forbidden, boy, to go there.ˮ
Always Know
RON WELBURN Life knows no embarrassment / than being unprepared, / caught in the rain flatfooted / before ceremonies, / nabbed in the seat of the pants / by the stealth of Coyote. / Knowing when what you need to know / is a leisure and sometimes / our filled baskets have more stones / and herbs than we can…
Upright Members in Good Standing
A. KENDRA GREENE It does not yet occur to him that what he’s doing has anything whatsoever to do with an Icelandic penis museum. He has no idea that by the time he picks me up from the airport a few weeks later, I’ll want him to make a donation. Indeed, at first, I do not know it myself.
Hippocampus
BINO A. REALUYO Memory: a man cradles his son onshore, / pressing warm sea breeze on his tiny rebellion. / If men gave birth, what would become of gods? / I find myths in ruins. Aging now / and like pieces of shells—no wholes, / I ask: If I could find Love in Evolution, / why would it matter whom…
Operation Tamar
OMER FRIEDLANDER When we were done, Tamar took the fruit to her mom, so she could make it into jam. Once it was ready, we stored it in the bomb shelter, along with the rest of the emergency supplies. The shelter was in the basement of our building, and we shared it with three other families.
Brother Love
TANYA COKE Scrawny was my first thought. I’d babysat enough by then to place his age at just shy of a year. As my father handed him to me, the baby arched his back in protest, his chicken butt threatening to escape his diaper completely. I could tell that a man had fastened it...
The Way Cacti Quiver
SARA ELKAMEL I am beginning to think about the middle, / and how we should behave in it. / When I say you held me closer than clouds hold birds / you tell me it was coincidence we slept at all. / Of course I want it to stop. I dream every night of a man / with the head…
Letter from American Airspace
ELIZABETH A. I. POWELL The end of romance was what the teenage girl / was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin / in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I., / but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven. / She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be…
Weeds and Flowers
BINA SHAH The blonde hair had been the only part of her friend Shazmina had been able to recognize once the bus had done its work and Gul Noor was a crumpled piece of cloth on the ground. They’d said the bus was going the wrong way, or maybe it was Gul Noor who had gone the wrong way…
The Dam
JAMAL ALDIN ALI ALHAJ It was early in the night, and the village was shrouded in darkness. The uneasy calm heightened the darkness, and he could hear the throbbing of the water pumps… as they drew up the Nile water… In this gloomy weather… Humayda was battling the laws of nature...
I Remember Stopping on a Little Bridge in 1972
JAMES RICHARDSON It is so late / it is early, and there, once again, / is that thrilling and disturbing bird / of dawn, its four notes, / one two THREE, four climbing / a little way up into the future / and back down, and once again / everything that’s mine is in a rental truck / or in the future.
One Night in the Midwest
CATHERINE ESTHER COWIE I smell her— / she is in the bed sheets / conjuring aged summers / when popsicles stained / our mouths red, / and the sun colored / our noses black. / We wore her jewels proud, / brown bodies glistening / in our neon pink and purple suits.
Autopsy
JANUARY GILL O'NEIL I have read the report—inconclusive. / Yet, I know how much your brain weighs, / your liver, your heart. Your ordinary, / damaged heart. I know it by the gram. / I think about the last hands to touch you, / your cool body fully fixed in rigor. / Hospital band around your left wrist...
Waiting on Forty-Five (A Ghazal)
MIRA ROSENTHAL and then I remember the faint aching hiss of nitrous leaking from the tip of the siphon into the open mouth of me / a hit off the pressurized cream of me / in the darkened storage room round back of the restaurant of me / at twenty-one, the different sounds that rustled in me...
Silence of The Lambs: A Starling Is Born
REILLY D. COX She’s right: / I was such an ugly bird. / She says that any bird raised as a boy / is conditioned as a boy and cannot ever / change that, and I don’t correct her. / If boyhood is a circle of boys above me / stomping purple flowers into me, / then I’ve known such…
Love Song (1)
MARCUS MYERS If our bodies are vessels, hers sailed away. / I am sunken eleven months deep, away from her / hazel eyes like aulos pipers for my oarsmen, / away from her / sun-warmed sides and bronze-sheathed prow. / Before she sank me, we rowed a while together / and she seemed to like the wake we made.
Offering
TARA SKURTU It was the first time I’d lived / with a man, and I wanted him // to translate the name of our street. / He was holding my cold fist // in his own, and we were on / Ofrandei, in the middle of unpaved // Bragadiru, Romania, on our way / home.
Love Poem with Forgetting
DANA ALSAMSAM I come home and for a moment before the door clicks shut / you don’t hear me. You go along singing Morrissey, cooking / what smells like potatoes, pouring Bulleit into a glass I bought. / For a moment before the door clicks shut I see the singular / of you.
Joint Account
THORAYA EL-RAYYES sighing, she wraps the fifth layer of white cloth over the body, folding the corner of each sheet away from the stiffened face. “alhamdulillah, like a rose” the corpsewasher says to the windowless room of sullen women as she runs her broad hand over the cold cheek.
The Warehouse
OSMAN AL-HOURI In the not-so-early morning, the beach enjoyed a calm troubled only by the swishing of the waves and the murmur of the sea against a rocky spit that extended into the water. At the foot of the white bakery, the waves broke in a monotonous sequence.
Nocturne
RICARDO PAU-LLOSA Blue, the infinite within a boundary hue. / Edo artists relished its blood-drain / of sea dawns. Westerners learned to brew / from the Virgin’s mantle the brim celestial stain. / sun-warmed sides and bronze-sheathed prow.
Modern Gods
JOHN FREEMAN Backlit by the glow / from a small passageway, / he kneels into the fog / of yellow light, / head kissing the carpet. / I step around him, / respecting his privacy, when / the mat becomes not prayer / rug but builder’s tool, / a black piece of tarmac, laid down…
Mehret, or Sakina, as She Calls Herself
BWADER BASHEER Your father died. We buried him yesterday in the new cemetery by the cliff. The priest spoke about him in Amharic and the imam spoke in Arabic and then we all prayed, each in our own language and religion.
The Opening Ceremony
BUSHRA ELFADIL Every Friday morning, all the residents in the simmering neighborhood of Wilat in this drab African city waited for the General to appear, to officially open the narrow street that passed between their houses.
The Creator
ABDEL-GHANI KARAMALLA The dog told me I would marry her in the liminality of al-barzakh, that my body had not yet ripened or become hard like clay, and that it would not until after the first death; there you can have ninety-nine names, or one for every creature; as many as you like.
Flash
LEMYA SHAMMAT He spotted her slender body, whipped by the hot air, on the verge of being flattened by the wheels of the racing cars. Without hesitation, he decided to save her. He glanced around, then rushed to launch himself deftly into the air.
Sara Who Married a Dead Man
AHMAD AL MALIK She stepped quickly, her body weightless now all the years of waiting and false promises were set aside. Face shining, renewed, it was as though three decades of dread had swirled up and away with the incense smoke and the dust raised by the devil’s music.
On the Train
ISHRAGA MUSTAFA HAMID The ride on the train from Kosti, known as “the steamer,” marked the start of the summer vacation. As soon as it began, I felt a mixture of sadness and joy—joy that I would be traveling on the westbound train again, and sadness at leaving my hometown...
Crater Lake
MARCUS SCOTT WILLIAMS i’m eavesdropping on flies. issa lil smoky from the yearlong wildfires so we can’t see clear across the lake. i dip my legs in the icy water. the water lapping is so fucking serene, get the fuck outta here. my ghost-heart earring falls in prompting Myrrh to save it for me. they swim in & release locks of…
Nothing More Human
SURAJ ALVA You are in a chamber, waiting for the bailiff. When he comes in, you wish you had been killed. Not your brother. The rusted scent of the metal chair you’re on reminds you of the smell of his blood on your hands, chest, and hair: sweetly pungent with a strong hint of iron.
Inheritance
BRIAN SIMONEAU Watch where now we walk: city shuttered from its own / past, abandoned tracks replaced with mulch and gravel / trails coursing through a park of imported forest / the way original sin veins every future. / Given choice, let’s follow the snake who understood / nothing’s good as its promise...
Communion
ZACK STRAIT This is the body, broken for you, the minister says, placing / a small moon on my tongue. I pull it into my mouth / like a placebo and chew slow, grind the moon into dust / and light. This is the blood, he says, passing me / a bowl of dark water...
Speed of Flight
CATHERINE BUNI The four of them lay on the rug in a circle. They could not be still. They could not shut the hell up. They played blackjack, betting for fistfuls of jerky their dad kept stashed on a kitchen shelf. Only rarely did the girl beat the boys, though she was next to oldest.
Love, Under a Falling Sky
MEGAN PINTO Say Chicken Little was right, that the sky / is falling. What I want to know is, / will the moon fall too? Will it bounce softly / like swiss cheese, or will it crumble / like a stale cookie? Do skies bruise? / Do they ache? And is the sky/ a metaphor for all the ills and evils / of the…