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Damascene Dream

September 10, 2025 Dispatches

Anaheim, California, dreaming of Damascus, Syria — a place I have not been able to visit since the war began in 2011.

I had a dizzying dream last night. I picked up the phone, and called my grandma—my mom’s mom, the woman who raised me. She was laughing—I told her something about what I had been going through, I don’t remember what. I was being candid in a way that would be unthinkable in the real world; maybe I even told her about the ugly breakup with R. The warm acceptance on the other line astounded me. “Why don’t I call you more often?” I asked her.

“Wallah tayteh, I miss you, you should tell me everything.”

Hitting a Wall and Making a Door: A Conversation between Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta

September 8, 2025 Audio, Interviews, Poetry Recordings

Phillis Levin (left) and Diane Mehta (right)

DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN’s conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. Though what appears below can only be fragments of their full exchange, the two poets—both previous contributors to The Common—share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, formal constraint, and expressing multiple perspectives in poems.

This interview includes recordings of many of the poems mentioned, read by the author.

River Landscape

September 4, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By DANIELA ALCÍVAR BELLOLIO

Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.

Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.

—Jack Rockwell

From IHOP

September 3, 2025 Dispatches

By LUCHIK BELAU-LORBERG

Photo courtesy of the author.

Shrewsbury, MA.

There’s a family seated at a window booth across the aisle from us; the youngest daughter keeps attempting to pronounce “syrup.” I wonder what she’ll remember of this breakfast in five years’ time. Maybe today she reminds you of me.

My earliest memories of an IHOP are sticky: the yellow walls seeping into the faux-leather booth seats; a stain on the carpet. All this beneath a crumpled-looking roof in a parking lot below the I-90 on the outskirts of Boston. Still, I could order as many blueberry-chocolate chip pancakes topped with creamy-fruity smiley faces as I wanted. The point wasn’t that I particularly liked eating the smiley faces, but that there simply were and could be smiley faces. And, in the meantime, before my hot cocoa (also with whipped cream) arrived, a crate of Smucker’s jam packets to stack and suck on awaited on the tabletop. This Ur-IHOP was sweeter than home, overtly abundant, happy, and these qualifiers felt, at the time, somehow synonymous. At home, mornings typically consisted of milky buckwheat porridge and cheese curds. Here, breakfast came with a set of primary-colored crayons.

Lily Lloyd Burkhalter on “Raffia Memory”

August 29, 2025 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Lily Lloyd Burkhalter

Lily Lloyd Burkhalter speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Raffia Memory,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Lily talks about traveling to the Cameroon Grassfields to research the rituals and production of ndop, a traditional dyed cloth with an important role in both spiritual life and, increasingly, economic life as well. She also discusses the book-length project she’s working on, which explores loss, grief, fabric, sewing, and weaving.

August 2025 Poetry Feature: Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings

August 28, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By ANNA MALIHON

Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS

From Girl with a Bullet, forthcoming October 2025

Presented in Olena Jennings’ seamless translation, Anna Malihon’s new collection, Girl with a Bullet, is one of the most important books of the year for those with an interest in the fate of Ukraine, a gift to Anglophone readers.

—John Hennessy, poetry editor

Table of Contents:

[The girl with a bullet in her stomach]

[Don’t go into that home]

[Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,]

[Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,]

Dispatch from New Madrid, Missouri

August 27, 2025 Dispatches

By MADELINE SIMMS

New Madrid, Missouri

I. Mississippi River, Dec. 16, 1811

After midnight, cottonwoods are inconsequential teeth, ripped from the ground by the Mississippi River. An elm snaps like a bird’s neck: an egret. The current betrays every fluttering heart and rages on. A rock becomes sepulcher to the uprooted nest. The river could be less cruel, the winter, more forgiving. Someone could have conceived of this world, but for days, no one but a pair of swans bears witness to the earthquake. The strange earth frees itself into unimaginable fissures. The bank splits and pools into the tall prairie, the way a pail of milk might spill across an oak table. Even water will stain the strongest wood. Supposedly, there is quaking, waking what’s left of the neighbors, small animals that somehow survive. What is survival to the breathless that can’t forget? How long was the egret chick left flinching? There are traces of disruption here: feathers without blood, nests without eggs. Devoid of particular destination, another will roost again.

What We’re Reading: August 2025

August 22, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

The summer months for The Common’s staff have been filled with wandering, around Western Massachusetts and beyond. Throughout this wandering, we’ve carried books which roam themselves, where relationships parallel the movements of the landscapes they traverse. Editorial Assistants BEN TAMBURRI, LUCHIK BELAU- LORBERG, and CLARA CHIU, and Applefield Fellow AIDAN COOPER recommend three novels and a poetry collection which brought them solace during these long, sweltry days.

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, recommended by David Applefield ’78 Fellow Aidan Cooper

Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand audiobooks. There’s something about the pace or the performances that irks me, or maybe it’s something about being slightly insoluble in the story, while I drive, or fold laundry, or task my hands with whatever it is that isn’t turning a page. For me, reading has always been about following and, more importantly, re-following where the words before me lead; I flip here and there, underline and annotate, and generally meander through and indulge in the language’s turns. But because this summer has been one interwoven with travel, tugged along by the two yellow lines in our potholed New England roads, I decided (betraying my brand) to put O Pioneers! by Willa Cather through my car radio.

Talks with the Besieged: Documentary Poetry from Occupied Ukraine

August 21, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By ALEX AVERBUCH

Translated by OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK, MAX ROSOCHINSKY, and the author

Piece appears below in English and the original Russian and Ukrainian.

Translators’ Note

Alex Averbuch authored Talks with the Besieged on the basis of his engagement with group chats on Telegram and other public IM platforms by Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The present selection is excerpted from this larger work that explores the relentless and evolving nature of the occupation, capturing the initial bewilderment and disorientation experienced by those who stayed behind. These brief, fragmented exchanges reflect civilians navigating the chaos of war in real time. Oscillating between found poetry, a digital archive, and virtual testimony, the text presents the fears, anxieties, aspirations, and dreams of the community enduring liminality and existential uncertainty. In translating these dispatches, we’ve attempted to approximate the casual, matter-of-fact tone of participants, their poignant attempts to lighten the mood, encourage each other, and offer reassurance and consolation.While Telegram and many other IM platforms offer automatic capitalization for each new comment, we decided to use lowercase letters instead, capitalizing only toponyms and proper names. We have also removed the names of the original contributors, blurring the distinctions between them and obscuring where one utterance ends and another begins. We hope that these decisions help render the text as a continuous uninterrupted expression of hope and terror and create an impression of a living chorus, a droning and wailing unbroken human voice.

The Reading Life: You’re Going to Hear the Pages Turn

August 14, 2025 Essays

By WILLIE PERDOMO

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

In the grade school days of Hooked on Phonics, I tested at a 6^th grade level when I was in 3^rd grade. But I didn’t really learn how to read until I was forty years old.

As a young person, I cherished books for their escape value. They provided portals to places where I could forget the bullies on the block, my pre-teen insecurities around image and masculinity, and travel to fantastical underworlds, or follow bookish kids who saved a neighborhood from a villain’s corruptive grasp. My favorite time of the school year was the announcement of the Scholastic Book Fair. I couldn’t wait to get home and check off my selections on the order form. My mother limited my order to two books, sometimes three when she hit a number. I don’t remember what criteria I used, but a title with the word “adventure” was usually a selling point.