News & Events | Page 167 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Arabs on the Beach in Alexandria

April 30, 2018 Essays, Issue 15, Issue 15 Essays

It was the summer of 2013, a formidable summer in Egypt. We walked from our villa toward the sea, carrying collapsible aluminum chairs, bags of cucumber-and-cheese sandwiches and pea-sized yellow grapes that are called banaati—literally, “girlish.” This had been our ritual for the past seven Fridays. My grandmother walked ahead with my aunt, and I followed floppily in their morning shadow. We spent every weekend at Qariyet El Muhandiseen, one of many gated compounds that have sprung up in the last four decades, providing summer getaways for the Egyptian elite. Completed in the late eighties, only twenty-six kilometers west of Alexandria, this one in particular is considered démodé.

The Bus

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By MAHMOUD AL-RIMAWI

Translated by ELISABETH JAQUETTE

Between France and Marrakech is a route upon which travels a single bus from Paris. The bus reaches its destination safely, as one might hope and expect. Then the passengers who so desire transfer to another bus, which takes them by an established road to Agadir.

A Complicated Letter to Sándor Ferenczi

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By JESSICA LANAY

It may be cliché to say this now, but how people treat themselves can show you how they treat those closest to them, then other strangers. I often forget to water my flailing herb garden. I often force my body—muscles hard from the lactic acid produced in my anxious panics—to be pleasant to my lovers, who expect pleasantries.

From Husband Number Four

April 30, 2018 Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA
Translated by NATHANIEL GALLANT

I have enclosed this letter in another sent to Mr. Lama Chobuden¹ of Darjeeling, India, and expect by now it has been forwarded along from him to Japan. While I am not without my concerns as to whether or not you will indeed receive the letter, if by some chance it were not to make the passage, I am given solace only by the fact that you are not in any particular anticipation of a letter. That being said, if you are to receive this letter, I am certain that you will find yourself taking some amusement in my fate. First, I am living in Tibet. Second, I have become a Chinese person. Third, I share a wife with three other husbands.

In New Cities We Run Into No One

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

& no one believes the future is horses falling
beneath ten thousand satellites & ten thousand
tombs & who in the new
cities will say through
horses of fire & phosphorous drain
that we could make the journey alone
a temple?

Tree House

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By NICK MIRIELLO

A father is only as good the tree house he never builds
Which he’s promised to his children before
they were script on checkbook, a practiced inheritance
from his father, and his father’s
father.

From the Jane Doe Series

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Art, Studio

By ALAA TAWALBEH

Untitled from the Jane Doe Series

Sticking Around the Karate Tournament to Watch the Teenage Black Belt Boys Fight

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By MARLIN M. JENKINS

There’s so many of us here: hood boys taught
discipline through bowing and bare feet, through
knowing the leg is just as much of the punch as
the knuckle.

from When Rap Spoke Straight to God

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By ERICA DAWSON

Kool G. Rap said, Cover your head
’cause it’s a dead zone in the red
zone. Rap said, God, now this is ire.

Fascinations

April 30, 2018 Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction

By PHILIP BRUNST

1999

My mother comes to visit me every few weeks. There’s nothing unusual about that, except she lives in a nursing home she isn’t supposed to leave. She wraps what used to be my father’s long winter coat over her shoulders, pays one of the nurses to sneak her out, and climbs into the back seat of an idling car that waits outside.