Strange to go back
To the house I’d left
Eight months before.
Empty now, sold
Short, short-sale, mortgage
Underwater, upsidedown.
Issue 06 Launch Party and Trivia Night
November 8, 2013
News and Events
Event Date:
Thursday, November 21, 2013 – 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location:
The High Horse
Join us at The High Horse to celebrate the launch of The Common Issue 06 with a night of games and trivia about locations and languages featured in the issue. Compete in groups to win epic prizes! All are welcome!
Reprint: Travel Writing in the Twitter Age from Hippo Reads
November 8, 2013
Essays
By SARAH TORY
Six months ago, Paul Salopek walked out of Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, heading northwest across the parched expanse of the Great Rift Valley. He will be walking for the next seven years.
Bahia Has Its Jeito: Pt. 1
November 6, 2013
Dispatches
My family and I recently relocated to Brazil, the motherland I left over twenty years ago. Our reasons for moving were whimsical, devised in the middle of a torturous Wisconsin winter: the lure of adventure, the tropical climate and, our one practical excuse, the opportunity for my husband and daughter to master Portuguese – a language I considered my own.
Review: Lotería
November 4, 2013
Reviews
Book by MARIO ALBERTO ZAMBRANO
Reviewed by
Lotería is a Mexican card game that is played like bingo but with images instead of numbers. It is also the title of Mario Alberto Zambrano’s first novel about a traumatized child and her family, whose lives on this side of the border go disastrously wrong.
Zambrano uses lotería cards as a device to tell his story. Narrated by 11-year-old Luz Maria Castillo, the story is divided into 54 short vignettes, each beginning with a full-color picture of a lotería card. It is a gorgeous and expensive-looking book. (Applause for artist Jarrod Taylor here.)
A brief primer: The cards are printed with simple images: The Rose, The Drunk, The Mermaid, The Sun, etc. Each image has a corresponding dicho, or saying, but the dealer often improvises these sayings with inside jokes. Once the dealer calls out the saying or joke associated with the card, the players look for the image on their own tabla, or board. The first player to mark off a line of images wins. Lotería is good family fun. But in Zambrano’s Lotería, the Castillo family holds the worst hand ever. Poverty, border economics, and dysfunction tear them apart and rob them of hope.
Error Upon Me Proved
November 1, 2013
Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
A sound I hope to hear no more
than once—faint chime, small ring
produced by a wedding ring, rose-gold, flung
five flights to the cobbles of Rue Valadon
from the closet-sized kitchen where, wrung
dry, come to the end of endurance and all sense
of possibility, I had thrown it out the window.
Aphrodite
November 1, 2013
Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry
By DAVID GAVIN
About twelve years ago I went into a museum in southern Turkey:
Antalya, a resort town on the Mediterranean. I’m not really
the type of person who hangs around museums looking
at artifacts behind glass
Arab Springs
November 1, 2013
Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
By ANDREA SCOTT
And the clucking tongue of a woman in her black chador . . .
And the feeling that this may be less than what’s real . . .
I cannot translate what the old man has said, grinning toothless from
the computer screen.
He’s cursing the Mullahs and all that’s hypocritically holy in Iran.
How Strange, How Sweet
November 1, 2013
Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry.
This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams.
Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour.
O
November 1, 2013
Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
As the deaf-mute grocery clerk
puckers curious to a chorus “O”
to ask what kind of mushrooms
he should be ringing up, I think
of Ortiz and last night’s double
