Then
it was a
place refracted
by the prism of history and
still in a kind of shock
of the past,
Berlin
May 12, 2015
Dispatches
My Redemption at the Movies
May 11, 2015
Essays
The last thing I remember about my father was him walking away wearing his camel coat. I remember him from the back, his dark hair escaping from his hat.
It was Christmas evening and it was cold, for Rome at least. He had just accompanied me to a train, which I would take to reach my cousins in Calabria. He was not happy that I was leaving, and would die a few hours later. A stroke, the doctors said.
Friday Reads: May 2015
May 8, 2015
Reviews
May 2015
May 7, 2015
Poetry
Please enjoy five new poems by our contributors.
Review: My Sunshine Away
May 4, 2015
Reviews
Book by M.O. WALSH
Reviewed by
Most of us who are over 20 can point to a few big events that set us on the road to adulthood. For the never-named narrator of M.O. Walsh’s debut novel, My Sunshine Away, it was the rape of his teen crush during her sophomore (his freshman) year of high school, Lindy Simpson. The narrator and Lindy have been neighbors since grade school, during which time he has harbored an innocent, but obsessive love for her. The search for the unseen rapist—who knocked her off her bike and forced her face into the ground—brings all the neighborhood oddballs into suspicion. It also brings the narrator closer to realizing his puppy-like fantasy. Unfortunately, he implicates himself in the process, in multiple ways. During this time, his divorced parents are still acting out their drama, and then his sister is killed in a car accident, leaving no adult—except a loveable but unstable uncle—with time or emotional bandwidth to spare for him as he lurches toward maturity.
Plymouth
April 29, 2015
Dispatches
By JOHN MARTIN
Even viewed from a distance, the harborfront tests the capacities of peripheral vision, tall masts and rigging far off to the right, and in front of us, here, clumsy, rectangular structures painted white with enormous, clear windows that darken in the afternoons.
Two Flat Tires
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
On the same side
turn a car
into a parallelogram,
an oft-read Bible,
a shelf of books
with a few
missing, a man
sitting and a woman
standing. Her hand
is on his shoulder.
Yelabuga
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
Audio: “Basta” by Sara London
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Podcasts & Audio
Sara London reads her poem “Basta” from Issue 09 of The Common.
The King of Bubbles
April 23, 2015
Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction
By EDIE MEIDAV
Sinking lower in the club’s hot tub and today a birthday marks his face one notch less recognizable when anyway, meeting someone these days means who you say you are matters both less and more. Who cares, really? Get older and it becomes easier to say who you are not. No king of industry, that myth abandoned before anyone finished saying Constantinople, but who even says Constantinople anymore, such flourish abandoned in his particular past as a history major, an epoch in which windmilling toward the future seemed to matter, toting around the flag of belief that what happened before could actually help you later. Now just a service-minded bumbler close to retirement going around to enlighten the masses and so what if certain efforts fizzled? Could happen to anyone.
