By NGUYEN BINH
Some strenuous days I
wish to be standing
by the sharp edge of
the tallest, hardest,
Your speech
tongue in cheek, like descriptions of cocktails
in this bar full of handsome strangers
who won’t meet my eye
Translated by PERWEEN RICHARDS
The Falling Sun
Great-Grandfather’s name is Hage, which means “revered and noble,” though to some it means “loquacious,” while others deny all definitions and emphasize that the name means “he who imitates the sun or its likeness.”
“At that time, people thought the sun had fallen to Earth. ‘De K’al… De K’al… De K’al… The sun has fallen… The sun has fallen… The sun has fallen…’ they screamed.” That’s how the story was told by our great-grandfather—he who knew all the secrets of the past and how it was. It was known that he had memorized everything that storytellers told about those distant eras and their events.
To say you cannot stand inside the sky and still see its blue
is a way of understanding longing. But here in Penne-d’Agenais,
my favorite lesson doesn’t hold: step over the threshold and
you are all in, Hail Queen in Latin exclaiming from its underside
above a carousel of vibrant glass. It isn’t ancient, but it is pleasing
for a Sunday. Nor is it really a basilica—just a church no one troubles
to diminish. Our guide jabs his thumb at the confessional smiling, and
I mime looking at my wrist, mouth, How much time do they have?
Nothing is very beautiful. They say it’s where a shepherd sheltering
in the ruins prayed for a goat and one appeared. Our pilgrimage is
for foie gras and wine. All day I think of how last week when I left
someone, I turned and they were still there waving. Of Plath writing,
The train leaves a line of breath. In truth, I’m desperate for a world I can
touch: limestone dissolving along the cave’s joints, parched earth that
extends the salvia’s roots. Not even we would exist without constraints.
The last time we saw each other, we had sex in the extra room then
made the bed to look untouched. You smoothed your hand over it like a
benediction. I crossed into the open air, your eyes flints of mica through
the glass. The far / Fields melt my heart. I would have left my whole body
there. Would scatter what was left over the plush acres of tobacco in
the Lot-et-Garonne, over the cherry trees hung low with fruit, to know
how it would feel to love this wildly, without purpose, and be forgiven.
Michelle Lewis is the author of Animul/Flame and the forthcoming Spare. Her poetry has appeared in places like Bennington Review, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Hunger Mountain, and Denver Quarterly.
By STELLA GAITANO
Translated by SAWAD HUSSAIN
I am completely alone, even though I’m not by myself. Here, filthy chickens scratch at the earth around me in search of worms and kernels. Next to me sits a pile of tatty newspapers—old news that I chew over when I’m beset with a yearning to read. I also keep a lot of family photos. Pictures of my children at different ages, from birthdays and other occasions, as well as pictures of work colleagues. Life that we have lived, frozen on these rectangles of stiff paper; how quickly we are ushered into the past by just glancing at one.
Amanda Mei Kim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “California Obscura,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing and art from and about the immigrant farmworker community. Amanda discusses how the essay changed and developed over many drafts. The finished piece explores her childhood growing up on her parents’ tenant farm in Saticoy, California, just north of Los Angeles. It also examines the long history of farmworker resistance and labor movements in the area, which crossed divides of race, ethnicity, and origin.
By ALAN BAER, CARLIE HOFFMAN, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, and FARAH PETERSON.
Table of Contents:
Rockport, ME
Saturday
At the laundromat the whir of machines,
whorled & busy, the pleasure & difficulty
of stillness Waiting, sockless, I aspire to be
the cross-legged woman reading a magazine,
By ALI SHAPIRO
Lightning Talk on I-90 by Ali Shapiro
Ali Shapiro’s work has appeared in Gertrude, Popula, PrairieS
By ANNELL LÓPEZ
“Dark Vader” is excerpted from Annell López’s I’ll Give You a Reason, out now from Feminist Press.
I was registering for the GED when Junie stormed into the house, slamming the door behind her. Her heavy Princess and the Frog backpack fell off her shoulder; the drop made the hardwood floors of our walk-up tremble.