For a gardener, geology is destiny. My little bit of earth is in a town surrounded on three sides by water. Chatham, New Jersey, sits at an elbow of the Passaic River that forms its northern and eastern boundaries. To the south, the so-called Great Swamp soaks vast acreage. Yet for all of its perimeter liquid, the town is built on rock.
The first sound is the gong
Of a dumpster, kicked possibly
By one of the homeless twins
Who live at The Mission, followed
By the rattle of glass and aluminum—
Signs of early success—against the cages
Of their grocery carts filled with cans, bottles,
Anything stamped with 5¢ deposit
Next to our state’s abbreviation.
By ELLIOTT HOLT
My friend K. and I traveled to St. Petersburg on the overnight train from Moscow, where I lived then. She had come from New York to visit me. It was December, 1997, and the cold was brutal, but you have to see the Hermitage, I said. So we took the train north and then, at dawn, made our way to the international youth hostel. It was the first one in Russia—opened in 1992—and like every hostel I’d visited, it was full of backpackers eager to tell us how much of the world they had seen. No one’s hostile in a hostel, I said to K. She and I had been out of college for just a couple of years; our fellow travelers were about our age. Many of them were from Australia and New Zealand. At breakfast that first morning— a room with tentative light and forlorn bowls of muesli—we met a young Japanese-Finnish woman. (Her parents were Japanese, but she’d been raised in Finland.) She had traveled from Helsinki, she told us, to photograph corpses.
“You’re from Garbage Island,” a college friend said.
He wasn’t wrong. My hometown housed Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world – so vast it could be seen from outer space with the naked eye. My classmate was from Queens, which, according to the rest of the city, was still a notch above Staten Island, the forgotten borough of parks. The borough with New York City’s trash.
Hennessy, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, is author of the previous collection of poetry, _Bridge & Tunnel_. His poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2013, The Believer, Poetry, Harvard Review, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, & The Yale Review.
Break out the beer and mead! As part of the Amherst Poetry Festival (Sept. 20-27), The Common has partnered with the Emily Dickinson Museum and Amherst Business Improvement District to bring you a night of Beowulf, readings, and beer at the High Horse upstairs pool hall on Thursday, September 26 from 6-8pm. From 6-7pm, contributors and friends of The Common will read poetry and fiction inspired by the epic poem. Then, from 7-8pm, UMass English Professor Stephen Harris will discuss Beowulf with epic readings in English and Old English to the beat of a drum. Indulge your inner medievalist and join us for a night that will “fill Heorot with head-clearing voice, / gladdening that great rally of Geats and Danes.”
Featuring readings by The Common contributors Brad Leithauser and Naila Moreira.
It’s summer in Zion National Park, and I am thinking about water. Thunderstorms have felled trees and left silt in the air, and the river slicing through the center of the canyon rushes high and murky, the warm red brown of long-brewed chai. Sagebrush sweetness mixes with evergreen; cedar leaves rustle; and in the morning cool below mountains of rock, it doesn’t feel like Utah.
A handmade dress passed down
from your mother finds space
in the cedar chest at the foot
of the bed. The chest, a relic
of your father’s, bore a new
ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews TERESE SVOBODA
Terese Svoboda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently the novel Bohemian Girl, which Booklist named one of the ten best Westerns of 2012. Her fourth novel, Tin God, was re-issued this year. Zinzi Clemmons caught up with her during a mild August to discuss Sudan, life in foreign cultures, and multi-genre writing.
Zinzi Clemmons (ZC): Your story “High Heels,” in Issue 05 of The Common, is set on an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean where Swahili is spoken. Which country is this? Did you intend for the reader to gain a sense of a specific location through the story?
Terese Svoboda (TS): It’s Lamu, off the coast of Kenya. It should evoke the disorientation of an extreme change of location for the characters — and, of course, of an island in the Indian Ocean.
This week, as an end-of-summer treat, we present you three stories by The Common contributors originally published in our special Summer Fiction Issue. Enjoy!
Flood Control
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