A special portfolio of art and poetry from Ukraine; short stories from Morocco, Canada, Maine, Phoenix, and Cape Cod; essays about the body and a ruined city in the Argentine Pampas; and poems on art, dance, family, waiting, and loss from Wyatt Townley, Robert Cording, Lawrence Joseph, Anna Maria Hong, and more.
- ROBERT CORDING my mother and her mother, / four heart attacks and two open-heart surgeries / between them, breathing heavily, / but still going, arms and hands dipping / and rising, their feet skipping and hopping, / as if a speeded-up polka was a form of time / travel
- MARTHA COOLEY Despite all my jiggling, the key didn’t work. My husband had had the locks changed a few months earlier, when our tenants left, and neither of us had remembered I’d need a new key. Home had become a word without a referent.
- TAMAS DOBOZY My other aunt, Lilian, has towering black hair, like a cross between a 1950s country singer and a still of a vampire’s mistress from silent-era horror. Pornography, she sneers, is the scrawl of perverts on the walls of ancient Greece. It’s the reduction of the other to an object of desire. And any objectification of anybody for any…
- REBECCA WORBY Red, red blood, not the dark red of a period. I know this immediately even though I have only just had my first period in years, and as alarm bells go off in my mind, I begin to sweat, my heart suddenly clanging. It’s only day twelve of my cycle, as far as I’ve calculated, so it’s clear…
- CARSON WOLFE The morning after I had woken to him / holding his flashlight beneath my bedsheets, // I told him I felt too sick to go to school. / It’s always confused me, why I chose // to stay in his house another full day, / waiting for my mother to finish work. // Like any other, we played
- JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN That’s us, always leaping into the getaway car of daydream, / lit up lavender & tangerine. We are dancing with our mouths / like no one is listening because no one is listening but us.
- PEDRO POITEVIN I am the madness of the grand design, / I am the limit of where reason goes, / I am the science behind metascience.
- ALLISON FUNK You must leave everything you’ve carried / to enter the tomb, says the guide / pointing to the passage grave / mounded / with earth. From outside, / the tumulus all but obscures / death’s reach, / also its fruitfulness, which has already / filled my husband / with the sweet mystery / that suffused Eurydice.
- ANNA MALIHON Put down your toy death. / Go, return the sun’s face / to the longest night for me. / Here are peonies and June, / and soldiers tightly standing. / And never, / never will anyone leave you again…
- A. J. BERMUDEZ Now, Khalida notes, here’s where it gets interesting. She explains that, under Moroccan inheritance law, the vote on what to do with a property must be unanimous among shareholders. In other words, if fifteen brothers wish to sell their father’s property, but the sixteenth brother disagrees, the property cannot be sold. Such was the exact case of…
- LAUREN CAMP They listen for rules but I give none. They tremble / with their little power. Say many lives lead nowhere.
- VIKTOR NEBORAK A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons / on these civilians as on military echelons / and then been posthumously awarded // the highest orders! his name on honor lists! / banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks! / … if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.
- MARC VINCENZ It seems all the light of morning / has descended here where it’s usually dark / and frogs raise their heads in the bulrushes, / where the last sounds swarm among the oaks. / Weighing these few scraps, the things you’ve said / you leapt gardens to procure—there are still / more feathers on this side—hard work, /…
- ANNA MARIA HONG To your beached blessings, add this curse: / not making worse what glass makes / so clear but neither smoking the path to your impaneled store, absconded / documents across your bathroom floor, / public security, national writ walled in / where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
- ANNIE SCHUMACHER It is as if I were seeing time / or the whole story I once knew / laid across the altarpiece of my mind / as piercing and startlingly beautiful / as the glance of the beloved.
- THE MEAD ART MUSEUM More than thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent states that emerged from its territory continue to grapple with its legacies. In Ukraine, this struggle has unfolded amidst a political and cultural war waged by Russia.
- DIANA KEREN LEE My brothers and I were born, making five of us— / a star, a line that returns to where it began.
- MICHAEL ROBINS The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions
- LAURA GERINGER BASS She longed to get wet, a quick dunk, but the ocean was now empty of bathers, the dune behind Carla darkened by a long line of masked vacationers toiling up the incline in a laborious exodus, slowed by the necessity of maintaining a safe distance from one another’s sliding footsteps in the sand. It exhausted her just…
- MOISEI FISHBEIN And stay like that, and live / until you’re fully alive, / live in your skin, and live / as in strange primordial times / when waves and the wind heard / no voices between them
- ALBERTO DE LACERDA Everything is / What is there / And what is there / Never ends
- CASEY WALKER Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him.
- CORY BEIZER Eventually everything falls into disorder. That was what my physics minor taught me in college. When I met with the dietitian, I wanted to explain the law of entropy to her. That the chemical energy of food we consume is low-entropy, and the resulting heat energy we produce is high-entropy. I think about it constantly. That in order…
- MATT W. MILLER but if God pulled that Isaac shit on him, / saying “I want you to sacrifice your son / for me” it never would have got as far / as me strapped to some Moriah altar.
- JAMES RICHARDSON Indifference is far more efficient / than fission or fusion / as a weapon of mass destruction, / and far less problematic / than uranium or tritium / to procure, occurring, / as it does, massively in nature.
- ELIZABETH METZGER Part of her knows he will withdraw again / once they get home. Part of her thinks / this is the new love she’s pined for. / They swing their real invisible children between them. / Loving best in reflections, / they make each child again together. / This could be our life, she thinks / as the…
- GRAY DAVIDSON CARROL In the kitchen, I cry to the sound of my mother’s sobs. / Count the injections I have left before the vials run out. / There is no point in asking how, in asking why. Empire / does not answer questions.
- TEJU COLE I really believe in the novel as an innovative form. Yet I didn’t want novelty for its own sake. There had to be something necessary in how I approached the narrating. For me, this was a puzzle to be solved, this work of arriving at the many different ways a character might give an account of what it…
- REBECCA FOUST You & I will grow old, Love, / we have grown old. But this last chance // in our late decades could be like the Pleiades, winter stars seen by / Sappho, Hesiod & Galileo & now by you & me.
- JOSEPH LAWRENCE what we do is // precise and limited, according to / the Minister of Defense, // the President / is drawing a line, // the President is drawing / a red line, we don’t want to see
- SASHA BURSHTEYN The slagheap dominates / the landscape. A new kurgan / for a new age. High grave, waste mound. / To think of life / among the mountains— / that clean, clear air— / and realize that you’ve been breathing / shit. Plant trees / around the spoil tip! Appreciate / the unnatural charm! Green fold, / gray pile.
- ELSA LYONS Then I understood. Ellen was translucent. It wasn’t just her skin; all of her was less solid, almost ghostly. One day she might be totally transparent. And then what? How could Dr. Lopez have missed this? And Andrew? Well, it was still very slight. Maybe only a mother could notice something so subtle.
- JENNIFER ACKER "My horse was called Emmy, short for Emerald Star. Dad’s more mature, larger mount was named Sassafras, which he shortened to Sassy. If we hadn’t taken these girls home, they’d have been shipped to the glue factory. A pony may be the birthday wish of many young girls, and I was no exception.
- WYATT TOWNLEY Not the girl / after the party / waiting for boy wonder // Not the couple / after the test / awaiting word // Not the actor / after the callback / for the job that changes everything // Not the mother / on the floor / whose son has gone missing // I am the beloved /…
- CUSH RODRIGUEZ MOZ There’s doubt about the provincial and national governments: if they had built additional infrastructure during the five years leading up to the flood, a time during which the region’s hydraulic installations went untouched. And there’s doubt about the inhabitants: if they hadn’t been so reluctant to lose a tourist season.
Subscribe to The Common today.
Purchase this issue from The Common Webstore in print, Kindle, PDF, or e-book format.
Teach this issue in your classroom.
Table of Contents Issue 30
“On Fifteen Years of The Common” by Jennifer Acker
Fiction
“Mermaid of Longnook” by Laura Geringer Bass
“The Sixteenth Brother” by A. J. Bermudez
“Islands” by Casey Walker
“Faction of None” by Tamas Dobozy
“Ellen” by Elsa Lyons
“Smith” by Cory Beizer
Essays
“Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins” by Cush Rodríguez Moz (with photos by the author)
“Body Stories: On Miscarriage and Cancer” by Rebecca Worby
“The Melnikov House” by Martha Cooley
Poetry
“On Their First Date” by Diana Keren Lee
“In Another Version” by Elizabeth Metzger
“Late Orison” by Rebecca Foust
“Vermeer” by Alberto de Lacerda, translated by Maria de Caldas Antão
“At Newgrange on the Winter Solstice” by Allison Funk
“A Small Price & Without Warning” by Michael Robins
“Every Other Weekend” by Carson Wolfe
“Ars Poetica: Getaway Car” by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
“Waiting for the Call I Am” by Wyatt Townley
“Small Mariners” by Lauren Camp
“A Meeting on Waterways” by Marc Vincenz
“Castanets 84 | Being fond on praise” by Anna Maria Hong
“The Universal Set” by Pedro Poitevin, translated by Philip Nikolayev
“Oblation” by Matt W. Miller
“Anti-Aubade” by Gray Davidson Carroll
“Ontologies” by Lawrence Joseph
“Mind Drifts” by Lawrence Joseph
“The Currency of an Industrial-Scale Slaughter” by Lawrence Joseph
“A Few Seconds Later” by Lawrence Joseph
“The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” by Annie Schumacher
“The Latest in Defense” by James Richardson
“Polka” by Robert Cording
Art & Poetry from Ukraine
“A Contentious Legacy: Art from Soviet Ukraine” from The Mead Art Museum
“Kol Nidre” by Moisei Fishbein, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
“Crimea. Summer” by Moisei Fishbein, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
“Taras’s Dreams” by Moisei Fishbein, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
“Death of a Hero (The Mosquito)” by Viktor Neborak, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
“Landshaft” by Sasha Burshteyn
“Accounting” by Sasha Burshteyn
“Donbas Days” by Sasha Burshteyn
“Ylang-Ylang” by Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings
“[It felt like blood]” by Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings
“[The poems between us grew shorter]” by Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings
Interview
The Epiphany in the Ordinary: An Interview with Teju Cole
