News & Events | Page 125 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Misfits

October 28, 2019 Fiction, Issue 18, Issue 18 Fiction

Neither pretty nor homely, fat nor thin, Bernice Gardener was a middling girl, all her fenders straight but no chrome or pinstripes. With a few ounces of vinegar, some colored powders or a curling iron, she might have done well with boys. Bernice, though, didn’t alter her pale skin and left her brown hair straight, aside from an occasional colored hairband. She wore jeans and print blouses or modest dresses her mother constructed from dime-store patterns. Though she tripled the outside reading assignment and earned the highest score in her English class, her teachers dismissed her as a mind of no consequence because she read The Thorn Birds, Peyton Place, and Gone with the Wind. She had pondered the term “making love” until she bought Valley of the Dolls in a used bookstore because she wondered why the girl on the cover seemed so pleased to be in a martini glass.

Portrait of a Man

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

“Portrait of a Man,” ca. 1470. Hans Memling (ca. 1430-1494). The Frick Collection.

By JEFFREY HARRISON

Hans Memling, ca. 1470 (Frick Collection)

I know this man,
or feel I do,
or think I could—
as though his face
effaced the centuries
between us,

Burying Seeds

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By AMA CODJOE

for Betty Shabazz

Who, when they killed her husband, was carrying
twin girls—not in her arms, but in an armless
sea, with bits of blood as food. She covered

Console

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By COLIN CHANNER

Now, the Grundig in this dealer’s window screaming,
the silent oval speaker like a Munch,
and I hear it on a Sunday as I best recall:

Eclipsed

October 28, 2019 Essays, Issue 18, Issue 18 Essays

By JESSAMYN HOPE

Normally along this straight back road in Idaho lay only quiet flatlands stippled with clumps of yellow grass, but today the prairie was bustling with cars and RVs and people gathered around camping chairs and telescopes. We were all here to see the Great American Eclipse of 2017—not only the first total eclipse of the sun to cross the country from Pacific to Atlantic in a century, but the first to grace the mainland at all in thirty-eight years. Since thirty-eight happened to be the median age in the United States, this meant roughly half the people readying to see today’s eclipse hadn’t yet been born the last time, and half who witnessed it then, in 1979, had since died. My husband and I, driving down the road in a blue compact, were a man and woman on the sadder side of the median, but only by a few years, so we weren’t used to it yet. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t decide how much this was worth, witnessing a total eclipse of the sun. I feared I might have lost the ability to distinguish true excitement from an admirable effort to keep life exciting.

Walking Barefoot, August

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By GAIL MAZUR

The flats mid-morning.
Fussy little house-hunting hermit crabs.

Razor clams, skate eggs, black mussels.
Sea glass frosted by the tides.

Fake: A Fable

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By R. ZAMORA LINMARK

Fake alternative facts
Fake Big Brother, bisexual bystanders, blogs, boobs, bobos, blow-jobs, Born-Agains
Fake clowns, CCTV beheadings, chlamydia and climate change hysteria
Fake democratic doppelgangers, drive-by death squads, double-dead buffets
Fake emojis, ejaculating cows, ejected United passengers, erectile dysfunction do-it-yourself kits
Fake faux furs, fat-free, Fentanyl-induced full moons

Tunnel #2 (Merlion)

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By LAWDENMARC DECAMORA

The shadow tall and lean, inspired by a lighthouse, squints at the Merlion. My morning behavior skips breakfast just to tell my body to overcome the effects of the Merlion. People at the pet store are quitting their jobs only to watch the Merlion spurt water from its mouth like the tunnels of human love. The newly admitted patient who is seen from the open window waves at the Merlion. Clairvoyants finally predict a winner with the face of Singapura tattooed on the mythic scales of the Merlion. Lovers split, fully convinced about the Mertiger calling itself no more as the Merlion. Children down 10,000 bottles of Yakult so they can help the Merlion save this lion city and the sea overflowing with centillion neon. The televangelist reports about a new miracle and how it takes advantage of the daily shifts of the Merlion, spatial to temporal, particle to plexus. Accountants give celebrities free hugs, their palms are sweating, after taxing the civil case of the Merlion. But hold on there, youngster. What is the color of the Merlion? Does it speak a foreign language like Resilience? Does it roar, swim, walk aimlessly around the Central Business District? Will it quit water and start eating poetry? I know a place where it can go when it’s alone. Through its mouth, a tunnel: right where it starts it ends.

Earth Has No Sorrow That Heaven Can’t Heal

October 28, 2019 Fiction, Issue 18, Issue 18 Fiction

By LYNN PANE

The motorized chair arrived, and Berger left it unwrapped in the middle of the living room. He circled it—keeping to the walls and the furniture to recover his balance—as if the chair was prey. He almost needed it, but he had the walker for the moments he grew tired. He imagined these new fixtures—the oxygen tank, the shower stall, the protein shakes—as gifts. Every day something new arrived on a delivery truck. He wanted the boxes to come wrapped in paper and ribbon, but then again, the boxes didn’t represent a future, and so he no longer turned his head at the sound of the doorbell.

Meditation

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By LESLEY WHEELER

Ivy worries the dying tree. Robins
worry the grass, which is hardly grass
but an audience of violets mimicking
the sky. Mist worries the mountain,
a neckache of twisted pearls.