The Common: Issue 22

A special portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf countries, fiction from a farm in Ireland, a retirement community in India, and the Basque Country in the 1960s, essays about Easter Island, living in Greece, and exploring the Southern Ocean, and poems by Tom Sleigh, Stephanie Dinsae, Vernita Hall, and Colin Channer.

Sandstorm
RASHA ALDUWAISAN There’s an itch in my throat like fox fur, / broom bush, cactus whittled to dust, / and my son thinks the city has vanished, / wind whipping up a smokescreen, / but still, he helps me sweep, / brings in cushions from the garden / asks me where the buildings have gone...
Opulence
RICHIE HOFMANN The night river calms me with its slow dirty movements. / I walk home briskly, in a black baseball cap. / I work at the fringes of the day. I write poetry in bed / and criticism in the bath. / Among my friends here, I have a man / who calls me love names / in four…
Ad Campaign for Truthiness
VERNITA HALL I’d Like to Buy the World / a bespoke chapeau because // bitcoin is the new fascinator. / (Don’t keep it under your hat.) // Climate Change—It’s the Real Thing. // Want a friendly forecast, a happy fortune / teller? Call Cassandra
Escaping East
ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY It was like going on holiday, permanently. / Even though I was six, I steered my own ship – / or pretended to, perched atop suitcases, / rolling along the corridors at Frankfurt International. / While half the world swept west, we trickled eastward...
The Streets These Days
J. KATES The life-size and realistic bronze has stood on its parklet street corner for so long that no one remembers whom it represented or what it memorializes. The sculptor had done a good job. It looks pleased with itself, proud of its accomplishments in life.
Last Cigarette
TOM SLEIGH After the explosions, the big one of the Big Bang, / the little one of the firecrackers set by some kid / off in weeds in the field, not a sound in outer space / or here back on Earth disturbs the perfect peace / of the unmoving afternoon. The body of the soldier...
Notes on Looking Back
STEVEN TAGLE Last year, I wandered through Greece, knocking on all the gates of Hades. I walked along the Acheron River, whose icy blue waters seemed colored by the spirits of the dead. Stalactites dripped onto the back of my neck as a silent boatman ferried me through the caves of Diros.
Apology to My Daughter
TOM SLEIGH For ten years, Hannah, the world convinced me / that thorn trees, desert, Land Rovers tricked out / with CB radios, machine guns and armor plate, / grew more real the harder it became / to fulfill my nightly promise to rebar and rubble / that some final vowel would reverse time / and resurrect stunted concrete into…
Khobar Spleen
NATASHA BURGE If a study is made of forgiveness, a want of thrift will be found. Gifts of old chocolate for those not with child, fat ribbons of serge. A majlis for old men, electricity provided, and a shy boy to bring tea. Posters from Eid and the Eid before.
Three Sunrises to Ouranopolis
NICHOLAS SAMARAS rode a slow bus out of blackness. / Five a.m. in northern Greece. / The language, blurry and mumbled. / I paid pastel money for a bus / ticket to Ouranopolis whose name / means “City of Heaven.”
Uwi
DANABELLE GUTIERREZ Uwi na tayo, let’s go home. My mother, / sentimental, kept the notes, I look at them // now, I wonder what home? Which one? / The rented apartment, Muscat, Dubai, // Vienna, where my mother is, or inang-bayan, / the country I am from, but barely know
Introduction: Portfolio of Writing from the Arabian Gulf
DEEPAK UNNIKRISHNAN The first line in my bio is the only one that matters: that I am a writer from Abu Dhabi. There is also my name, which gives away my origins and hints at mud-colored skin. My name is, however, silent about my life, my distaste for nationhood.
Self-Portrait as My Mother
HALA ALYAN When the warplanes come, I pluck them / from the blue sky like Tic Tacs. The cupboard / is always full of honey and needles. Merlot and Marlboros. / The rumor of America around my neck. / On the third day of the month I bleed a pond, / toss a gun into its mouth.
A Very Full Day
SHUBHA SUNDER He was, locals agreed, the quintessential Kaverinagar retiree. In his wool-silk trousers, navy-blue sweater, and plaid scarf wrapped tight about the ears, C. K. Rajgopal, former Air India pilot, cut a lithe figure as he strode down Eighth Main. On his feet he wore the ergonomic shoes...
La Vie en Rose
JEFF McRAE We scraped the Mississippi / mud off our old piano and father // blew his solos out the open window / and over the meadow / and mother made me strut / with her double-stops, drum sticks / in hand, the old rhythms / of everything I hadn’t learned / but was sure I heard bouncing...
Mercy
KATHLEEN HEIL I’m facing two stone walruses in a Platz near the death trap, / the death trap a life trap now, there’s no one out. / What do walruses dream under a socialist—now / capitalist—regime? I teem with desire. Teem. / Learn the etymology of the verb once meant / to birth...
Ghosts of the Southern Ocean
CARIN CLEVIDENCE My mother cuts the outboard motor. Over the slap of waves on the boat’s black pontoon, I hear the fur seals barking. The cliffs are dotted with white albatross. Seals sprawl along the rocky shoreline.
Mapping Exile: A Writer's Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait
MONA KAREEM As an asylee, I had to train myself to anticipate wisely, to never let my hopes rule over me—when opening the mail, when calling the asylum office, when having to explain why I was in this situation...
Igerilaria
JULIAN ZABALBEASCOA A slight wind picks up and moves over the lake, clinking rocks together in the wash. Salvador squints into the darkness. The way his fellow construction workers talked about America’s proximity, he’d half expected to sight the faintest outline of one of its cities’ skylines...
On the Way Back
AKSINIA MIHAYLOVA No, I have never seen a sad tree, / but I don’t want to keep reflecting the world / like a chipped mirror, / or cutting up Sunday’s lonesomeness / by tracking sunlight / as it leaps from yard to yard, / or damming the ends / of inaccessible seas that you send to me. / And I am out…
"It was No Arabian Nights at All": Coming of Age in America's Kingdom
KEIJA PARSSINEN Saudi Camp began as a thatch-hut slum abutting the ritzier “American Camp,” which was built for the white American executives of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in the middle of the twentieth century, when Americans flooded in...
Appetite
DAN ALBERGOTTI Emerging from her cocoon without a mouth, / the luna moth climbs onto a stem to unfurl / and dry her wings. She’ll find a mate tonight. // There will be no kiss. There will be no taste. / There will be no speech or song. After midnight / the still, silent couple will join like drops of…
Melh
REWA ZEINATI At the shore we don’t build anything. Behind our sunglasses, our eyes dart in every direction. A man carries a sandcastle on his back. A fish. Or is that a tattoo of a fairytale palace? His arms are full sleeves of ink. Maybe he’s been working in the financial district for years.
a good thing/found
BRITTNY RAY CROWELL prepare yourself / for entry / prime yourself to be stripped / like something ripe / and swaddled in soft velvet / never mind how the skin feels / peeling / the body will yield / remember you are claimed for / this plucking / open yourself
Family of Origin Rewrite: 1982
K. IVER My father teaches ethics at a university. / My mother teaches ethics at a university. / They save. Their money. Buy / a large bungalow in Connecticut. / They continue. Saving. Enough / to support the San Francisco AIDS / Foundation and their baby.
Khaleej Times #1
REWA ZEINATI the war drove us out— / and into my father’s used white sedan— / a school drop-off I’d hoped none / of the other kids would notice— / (their engines a roar of paid drivers). / everyone was from somewhere else
On Sugar and the Carnival of War
COLIN CHANNER At-sink coffee; / way horizon curry lined. / We’re spilling turbinado / as we spoon out in half light. / Jouvay. Sugar the jute frocked assassin / is clumsy, carries shekere and crunch, / disarms with hemp smell.
My Body as the George Washington Bridge All Lit Up at Midnight
ALEXANDRA WATSON 434 wires unlock the land / double-decked suspension / hot for incandescence / a 14 lane corridor / top exposed / stiffening truss / to come over
There's No Ignoring It Now
JEREMY MICHAEL CLARK The stir of weaker / creatures seeking safety: from afar, one could // call it beautiful. / Even if you can’t, I recall those mornings, the dappled / light spat across my cheeks.
Fixation
HALA ALYAN It’s like knowing there’s a house on fire / and only you have the key, but there’s / no address, the streets keep changing / numbers, and if you don’t make it in / time, everybody inside dies. Even the / houseplants. You never make it in time.
Joyriding in Riyadh
TARIQ AL HAYDAR The horror of the city. As Dhari tapped the steering wheel, he calmed himself by visualizing the beautiful woman who should be sitting next to him soon: shoulder-length blonde hair and sky-blue eyes.
Snake, Not Serpent; Hopelessness, Not Despair
ANGIE MACRI We shouldn’t use Latinate words, / too many syllables, abstractions, flowers. / Instead, use words with Germanic roots, / shorter, to the point. As if half our tongue / was wrong.
Quarantine
HERA NAGUIB Tonight, I halt to prior ghosts / that upwell again, funerary as the sirens / that shrill through the tracheal alleys. / When I tell F., he says, this is America— / what you leave for her claims you back. / Yes, the fountain veil loping / over the ribbed Red Sea
The Sea Dreams of Us
ROMEO ORIOGUN Before the sea became my journey, it was love, / folktales, it was our origin staring at us, / it was our shadows, then the ships of migration / came, reminding us, that years back, people left / in canoes loaded with hope, with spices, seafarers...
Screensaver
ROBERT CORDING Sure, every photograph is an elegy / to what was, but this photograph— / which I’ve turned into my screensaver— / of my son, dead nearly three years, / has him suspended in mid-air. / He has just jumped from a rocky outcropping / thirty feet above the shimmering water / of Lake George...
In Search of Hassan Matar
HITEN SAMTANI Sultan rose just after six and was almost immediately on email with his staff. These were less exchanges and more bursts of orders. It was important to him to be, and to be seen as being, decisive. He’d stretch, wash, pray, and get moving—a few minutes with his kids, some dates and laban, and time to go.
Dispellations: Manomaya Kosha
ANNA MARIA HONG You can’t defeat nature, you can only / work with it. Just as speculating / on a perpetrator’s motives—sex as / power, power as hard exercise / of a phantom sense / of impotence, / blah, blah, blah—is trackless, so too is / asking what does it want...
Rite
KWEKU ABIMBOLA Douse my skull. Take your / hands and comb my hair— / then, plait it. Surprise me, weave my hair / into something terrible. Into the flourish / you fear. Because if you don’t, I’ll know. // If I open my eyes and have nothing / to shelter my scapula and clavicles / from Asamando’s wind, I’ll know.
Oman Is Mars: An Alien All Along
PRIYANKA SACHETI The first time my husband visited me in Oman years ago, he peered down from the plane window and received his first glimpse of the landscape: an undulating palette of browns, beige, mauve, and grays. This is Mars, he thought to himself. Mars on Earth.
Castro Street
PHILLIP WATTS BROWN As through a prism, the city shifts / to rainbow. We cross into technicolor, / the famous marquee lipstick red / against blue sky.