News & Events | Page 139 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

A Ceremony for Yellow House

April 10, 2019 Dispatches

High Plains, West Texas

The West Texas winds blew heavy dust that clung to my eyelashes, and a bit of sand got into my eyes. It was a cool day in mid-summer, but Lubbock’s never-ending parking lots gave off residual heat that made me feel like I was baking. Lubbock has too many parking lots. Driving through town, lot after lot passing my window, made me long for the dull-green landscape of the plains only fifteen minutes away. I kept on down Broadway, past the empty lots where houses once stood, past the empty downtown (even though it was only 4:30pm), past the old segregated part of town that always brings out a bone-deep sadness in me, eventually making it past the last highway. I could see the NTS tower in my rearview mirror. Mac Davis’s song was right, I really like seeing Lubbock in my rearview mirror. I could have appreciated it more if it didn’t leave so much dust in my eye.

Under a Pile of Moons

April 4, 2019 Fiction

By BETSY JOHNSON-MILLER

We travel together to the outskirts of Alone. Hunger permeates the car like teenage funk, but there are no crumbs on the seats. I do not allow snacking.

I don’t know what is the most surprising—that a tumor grows inside me, that my love is not in the car, or that Hope sits in the backseat. A pillow, a book, and a look that annoys me every time I glance at her in the rearview mirror.

Silence in the Syrian Limbo: an interview with Odai Al Zoubi

April 1, 2019 Interviews

RAED RAFEI interviews ODAI AL ZOUBI

When popular uprisings against the Baath regime started in Syria in 2011, Odai Al Zoubi was in the United Kingdom working on a PhD thesis in Philosophy. He quickly became involved in the revolution, writing political essays to defend the right of Syrians to self-determination. But his literary passion was fiction. Since 2011 he has published tens of stories and literary essays in journals such as aljumhuriya and Romman and most recently “Silence” in The Common’s forthcoming Issue 17. “Silence” marks Al Zoubi’s first appearance in English translation.

Al Zoubi’s short stories capture feelings of transience shared by many displaced Syrians. They are often set in spaces of transition: a balcony overlooking the sea in Beirut or a mall in Dubai. There, characters caught between a past in ruins and an uncertain future have fleeting conversations, sometimes about matters that might seem trivial considering the gravity of Syria’s situation. But from the attempt to resume the banality of everyday life springs a profound existential anxiety linked to irremediable loss and a striving for survival.

Poetry and Democracy: Part Four

March 30, 2019 Poetry

In conjunction with The Poetry Coalition’s March 2019 joint programming exploring the theme “What Is It, Then, Between Us?: Poetry & Democracy,” The Common presents four weekly features this month, each addressing and extending this national—and international—conversation.

In this, our fourth installment, we offer Ron Welburn’s “Seeing in the Dark” and “Alternate Charles Ramsey” by Reginald Dwayne Betts.

March 2019 Poetry Feature: David Lehman

March 29, 2019 Poetry

This month we’re pleased to bring you selections from Playlist, David Lehman’s new book-length poem forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in April.

Dispatches from Queens

March 27, 2019 Dispatches

By KC TROMMER

These poems appear in We Call Them Beautiful, out now from Diode Editions.

Cleveland Hopkins International to LaGuardia, 2018

Queens, NY

Poetry and Democracy: Part Three

March 23, 2019 Poetry

In this, our third installment, we offer Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s “To the Women Who Feel It in Their Bones” and an excerpt from When Rap Spoke Straight to God by Erica Dawson.

Friday Reads: March 2019

March 22, 2019 Reviews

Curated by: SARAH WHELAN

Issue 17 is almost here! Subscribe by March 31st to get your copy, then kick off the weekend with a book recommendation from one of our Issue 17 contributors. This month, our contributors are taking us on inventive narrative journeys across all seven continents and through all four corners of consciousness.

Recommendations: I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine, Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin, Naming the No-Name Woman by Jasmine An, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Ice Lovers

March 21, 2019 Essays

By DAVID ROMPF

It’s mid-January, and I’ve come to northern Michigan to see a frozen river layered with fresh snow. On winter days, a long time ago, a young woman skated across this river to be with the man she would eventually marry. She lived in Hancock, a town draped on hills opposite my vantage point in Houghton, which sits on highland and spills, like its sister, to the Portage River. Her beau lived on the Houghton side and worked in a hotel with cupolas and a grand ballroom, two blocks up from where I stand observing the expanse of ice. I can’t understand how she skated after a snowfall, or in bitter wind and blizzard whiteouts.

Poetry and Democracy: Part Two

March 16, 2019 Poetry

In this, our second installment, we offer Megan Fernandes’s “White People Always Want to Tell Me They Grew Up Poor” and William Brewer’s “Daedelus in Oxyana.”