Dispatch: Two Poems

By SHANLEY POOLE

a broken down, rusty car  faces out toward a lightly forested, sunny, and hilly landscape.

Photo courtesy of author.

Hot Springs, North Carolina

A Mathematical Formula for Continuing

I’m asking for a new geography,
something beyond the spiritual.

Tell me again, about that first
drive up Appalachian slopes

how you knew on sight these hills
could be home. I want

this effervescent temporary, here
with the bob-tailed cat

and a hundred hornet nests.
Will you tell me the sequence

of Fibonacci? The secret
of the nautilus? Answer:

After the departure of your bedbound
lover, you took to the spiral,

reached what was thought the end
and found yourself pirouetting.

I have just entered the dance,
crawled inside the shell, you promise

this is its own beginning.

 

a smiling person lying on their stomach on a beach. the photo has a sepia-toned filter

Photo credit: Rachel Balkema (IG @raba.co)

Lake Michigan

This Trail Leads to Lake Michigan

I’ve been reading to numb things, namely
the evidence that my childhood creek
is drying, that something inside me is splintering,
like that wedge of the dock that buried itself in my thumb
while we watched quagga mussels starve another body.
You asked if I still had thoughts about starving. Lake Superior
is the clearest of the Great Lakes, but its belly is hungry.
I dust the house for the third time this week and wonder
at the ecosystem of our apartment: the under watered plants,
the dog that’s always pacing. I meet a stranger on a walk
and learn his home has woodfired heat, that his dog howls
when his wife leaves, that after this he’ll head to church
to cut the turkey. Today is Thanksgiving. I do not ask directions,
I let my conversation ask for company. He points to the trail post.
This leads to Lake Michigan, he says. As if I hadn’t walked this path
since the age my feet could carry me. At home, I ask
M if he’d like a woodfire stove, if he’d like to run away,
build a home with me. Somewhere Great: Lake Superior,
Huron, Erie. How about here? He asks. Why wait to start building?

 

 

Shanley Poole is an MFA candidate at UNC-Greensboro. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in Analog, F(r)iction, 14 Poems, and Quarter(ly) Journal. She was a 2017 fellow at the Beargrass Writing Retreat, a 2024 writer-in-residence at Azule Residency, and former Storyteller at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency. 

Dispatch: Two Poems
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Join Weekly Writes This Summer For Motivation and Accountability

Need some summer writing motivation? We’ve got you covered! Weekly Writes is a ten-week program designed to help you create your own place-based writing, beginning July 14.

We’re offering both poetry AND prose, in two separate programs. Whether you’re the next Dickinson or Dostoevsky, pick your program, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a weekly dose of writing inspiration (and accountability) in your inbox!
 

Join Weekly Writes This Summer For Motivation and Accountability
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May 2025 Poetry Feature: Dante Alighieri, translated by Mary Jo Bang

This month we’re honored to bring our readers an excerpt from MARY JO BANG’s new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, out soon from Graywolf Press.

 

cover of paradiso

 

From Paradiso: Canto XI

The first eighteen lines of this canto are Dante’s elaboration of human difference, his lament over the failure of some humans to realize their gifts, and an exultation for the opportunity he’s been given—which is to enter Heaven before he has died.

Thomas Aquinas’s clarification of “where they fatten up” begins at line 22 and continues without interruption until the end of the canto. In lines 124 to 126, Thomas complains that Saint Dominic’s flock, the Dominican friars, are showing signs of ambition and greed, seeking honors and offices. They are wandering away from the tenets of the order, which are to live a life of humility and self-sacrifice. In lines 137 to 139, he says, “You’ll see what has splintered the tree, / And how the remedy for that can be deduced from // ‘Where they fatten up, if they don’t lose their way.’” The tree is the Dominican order, and it has been scheggia (“splintered” or “chipped away at”) because so many of the sheep have strayed. If the monks and clergy remain true to the principles set out by Saint Dominic, they will be enriched with the “milk” of spiritual nourishment and “fatten up” the way sheep are meant to. 

Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante is concerned with the ways in which selfishness destroys the social fabric. He details how people pay for that selfishness in Hell or by having to trudge up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory. But Dante isn’t only interested in what happens after death, he is also talking about how we live while on earth. His life was destroyed by the petty grudges of partisan politics. As an exile, he was under constant threat of death. He takes great risks in writing his poem because he hopes that by addressing the greed and megalomania that is destroying Italy, he can help put a stop to it. He also knows that this is not a time-limited problem but a timeless one, which is why he wrote the poem in the vernacular—so that, unlike poems written in literary Latin, it would change over time. He said he was also writing his poem in the vernacular so that it could be read by everyone. That is why I translated the poem into the American vernacular. 

—Mary Jo Bang

May 2025 Poetry Feature: Dante Alighieri, translated by Mary Jo Bang
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Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

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Transcript: Lucas Schaefer Podcast.

LUCAS SCHAEFER speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about his story “Tuesday,” which appears in The Common’s brand new spring issue. “Tuesday” is an excerpt from his novel The Slip, out June 3 from Simon & Schuster; both center on a motley cast of characters at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Lucas talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the novel as a whole, which started over a decade ago as a series of linked short stories. Lucas also discusses how the novel’s central mystery came together, what it was like writing with humor and in so many voices, and how his own experience at an Austin boxing gym inspired the story and its characters.

lucas schaefer next to the common's issue 29 cover

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”
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What We’re Reading: May 2025

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer months, with their sprawling days, coax us to explore new literary worlds. If you’re not reading Issue 29—which features short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym—these recommendations from its contributors TERESE SVOBODA, NICOLE COOLEY, and BILL COTTER will help to revive the childhood magic of summer reading. Read on to discover poetry and prose titles that give permission, immortalize, and remind us how “fiercely beautiful” words can be.

cover of the swan book

Molly Giles’ Lifespan and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

Molly Giles’ 2024 memoir, Lifespan or the novel The Swan Book published in 2013 by Alexis Wright? The first is a perfectly wrought, very moving series of flash pieces of a life experienced above, under, around, and on the Golden Gate Bridge. The second is a wildly inventive, messy novel about the love of Australian black swans by a rebellious woman abducted from a swamp to be the wife of the Australian president. I won’t choose.

What We’re Reading: May 2025
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Fathom

 

Norfolk, Virginia/Virginia Beach, Virginia

 

When the whales wash up on shore, my friend grieves. I feel it too, but it feels further away. Deep in me, treading water, legs furiously churning under the surface. The first whale washes up on the oceanfront, just off the boardwalk. People drive out to stare at it. Its dark wet form deflates into the sand. I dont drive to find it but think of it all day.

I scroll through the Facebook comments that claim its all the fault of the offshore windmills, the sonic waves mapping the ocean floor pummeling through the ocean. Everybody seems to have watched the same hoax-y documentary funded by the oil industry. But of course, its the boats. The whales scarred and torn up by container ships. 165,000 tons of steel running into migration paths.

I tell my friend how they necropsy the whale, cut it from tip to tail—they call it peeling the banana.” Then, they cut it into small pieces and bury it right on the beach. My friend wails but Im not sure how real her emotion is. She wants to dig into the beach to find the bones. She disappears from my life just as quickly as she shimmered into it—she goes to the swamp in Florida and never returns.

I am alone again, and another whale washes up. And another. And another. In the Outer Banks, a minke whale. Another, a juvenile humpback female. A common cause of death is entanglement—shattered vertebrae, inability to swim, caught in fishing nets. I, too, feel very tangled up. I cannot put into words the size of the sadness I feel.

I look at the striped belly of the humpback whale. Her huge frowning mouth. In a YouTube video, the waves push her back and forth on the sand, but she never returns to the water. She likely weighs over two thousand pounds.

I am afraid for myself and the whales. I am afraid for my friend, who worries that she will accidentally kill the child that she hopes for. Before her disappearance, every Tuesday and Thursday at lunch, she tells me she wants to die. There are only so many times I can hear it before I stop sleeping. She pours everything into me.

I cry on the shore, just looking for somewhere to put my sadness. Everything that fills me up. I am floating like a buoy, gathering barnacles and gulls. I become a shell, a hollow tube strung through with wire.

Only two windmills have been constructed in the ocean off the coast of Virginia Beach, over twenty-six miles from the shore. Some people, dining at the rooftop restaurant of the oceanfront Marriott swear they can see them turning. Still, the birds continue singing.

Facebook commenters continue posting:
where are the spineless wastes of oxygen who care so much about this planet”
the sonar”
the windmills”
heartbreaking”
this is no mystery”
stop lying”
all those kids with a photo of a dead whale on their phone”

Norfolk, Virginia, is home to the largest naval base in the world. The ships are being built in a circle around the city—the banging never ceases. Every man I meet works for the shipyard or on base. Many of them never sail the ocean, but they build upon it.

The gales churn across the state and flood the streets with water. The cement walls in my building weep with moisture. A whale skull washes up on a beach in North Carolina and the news article is titled, Oh, Whale!” I want to tell my friend, but she is already too far away, wandering the aisles of IKEA, looking at baby blankets, thinking about dying.

I think it is only inevitable before we see each other on the beach. On an oily downtown street, getting watery iced teas. At the local museum, staring at strings of floating pink glass. 

The whales skull is gray and dark—it looks like a stone from an alien world. I wish I could pick it up and carry it. Seven whales wash up on the East Coast in thirty-eight days, and everyone is screaming. It is so easy to invent an apocalypse. I, too, sometimes wish the world was ending.

I watch an ant crawl across my notebook on the table outside the coffee shop and it is a smallness I cannot fathom. In the same way, I stare at the schooners docked at the harbor festival—all the ropes tangling and flapping in the strong winds. Ill never know where they lead.

A fathom measures how deep the water is—the unit of measure is six feet. It comes from the Old English word meaning outstretched arms.” Perhaps it is an embrace, a closeness, as our hands stretch further and further apart.

 

 

 

Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity. Her work has been published in Brevity, Kenyon Review, Diode, and others. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan University.

Fathom
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Crafts Like the Old Country

By NINA SEMCZUK

That morning Irina Pychenko found herself in the ditch, again. It was the fourth time in a month.

“Third time this week I’ve found someone right here,” said the gentleman outside of her window, who was hooking a chain to the tow hitch under the back bumper. She had barely finished mashing her grill into the snow when he’d pulled over. “You wouldn’t believe how many people haven’t got their snow tires on yet.” His words made white puffs in the air, holding his speech like cartoon captions. “You neither,” he said, kicking her half bald Buick tires.

Crafts Like the Old Country
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The Moon as a Beacon of Human Earnestness: A Conversation Between Boston Gordon and July Westhale

In poet JULY WESTHALE’s upcoming book, moon moon, humanity finds itself in a precarious position—Earth has become unlivable, forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere. But when the moon proves overcrowded, humanity pushes even further, settling on the mysterious and perhaps astronomically dubious moon’s moon. Part modern epic, part ecological elegy, the collection tackles eco-grief, climate change, and human hubris, all while weaving humor throughout its poetic narrative.

July Westhale, whose earlier books include the autobiographical exploration of class warfare in California, Trailer Trash, and the intense poetic meditation on desire and divinity, Via Negativa (praised as “stunning” by Publishers Weekly), brings their signature incisiveness and wit to this timely new work. They also released the recent Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana, a delicious translation of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Today, Westhale converses with poet BOSTON GORDON, author of Glory Holes and the forthcoming Loose Bricks. Gordon, who also champions queer and trans voices through Philadelphia’s acclaimed “You Can’t Kill A Poet” reading series, guides this thoughtful discussion as they delve into meditations on writing, the moon, and what poetry teaches us about ourselves. 

You can pre-order moon moon here

The Moon as a Beacon of Human Earnestness: A Conversation Between Boston Gordon and July Westhale
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Raffia Memory

By LILY LLOYD BURKHALTER

The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.  

Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.  

Raffia Memory
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