Don Share published three poems, including “Wishbone,” the title poem of his newest collection, in the first issue of The Common. He’s been on a roll ever since, publishing five books as author, translator, or editor in the last year and a half. Here are a few selections from and links to those volumes:
To get to Shanghai I take a Boeing 777 airplane to a Buick van to an Airbus 320 airplane to a Bombadier subway car to a Hyundai taxicab to a Shinkansen high-speed train to a Xiali taxi. This is China. This is a country in motion.
Book by BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ
Reviewed by
If you stand in front of the Kentucky Club bar in Ciudad Juárez and look four blocks north, you see the U.S. and Mexican flags flapping on top of the Santa Fe Bridge to El Paso. Families with roots on both sides of the border once passed fluidly back and forth over that bridge to visit cousins, go to school, grab lunch, get a tooth pulled, or for a night on the town.
The drug wars and immigration crackdowns have radically curtailed that flow, though it’s still possible, albeit scarier, for Americans to pop into the Kentucky Club on the Mexican side for a drink and sit on the same barstools where Al Capone, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe once perched.
By KURT CASWELL
Bending to a high-power telescope trained on the moon at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, specifically the terminator line that is the far reach of the sun’s light at this phase—waning Gibbous moon—the contrast of light and dark makes visible the rims and floors of uncountable impact craters. My companion and I can see the crater walls, the striated lines of some long past moment of chaos, the crusted lip of the crater’s edge where the force of that energy lifted and curled into a rift of moon rocks. The sun’s light on the lunar surface is so mesmerizing along that line, so utterly beautiful, that coming away from the eyepiece, all you can see is moon.
The ocean encircles a lone peak.
Rough terrain surrounds this prison.
There are few birds flying over the cold hills.
The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a Chinese immigrant carved this poem on the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. It was unsigned, one of many.
If Washingtonians have a patron saint, it’s the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice, a famous defender of civil liberties, Douglas was a committed environmentalist, who wanted to be remembered for leaving the earth more beautiful.
In February, Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute dubbed the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area Number One in the U.S. for traffic. Local drivers fritter away on average sixty-seven hours and thirty-two gallons of gasoline a year in traffic.
I was born in Washington and spent a good part of my childhood in the area. Though I haven’t lived there in years, each time I go “home,” I feel grateful to Justice Douglas for preventing my favorite Washington place, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, from becoming just another congested highway.
Thank you to the VIP attendees of this year’s Silent Art Acution and congratulations to the winners!
To view the original prints, photographs, rare books, and other gorgeous artworks and read about our remarkable artists on the The Common in the City 2103 Silent Art Auction webpage.
1.
I’ve been watching the Qasr al Hosn. Watching it since I arrived in August. The boarded-up block below my office window withholds this oldest structure in Abu Dhabi—the whitewashed fort—and the arch-studded building of the Cultural Foundation. The block has so much potential, but for months, nothing’s happened. Or, I’ll see a kick up of dust and realize it was the wind.
On the walk to Central Station I struggled to obey simple gravity. My limbs felt weightless, my feet didn’t feel at all. With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea.
By TARA DEAL
It has the name of a bug and sounds so ugly, like nonsense, but Morpion is real, a sliver of the slightest fantasy island in the Caribbean. One small circle, perfectly uninhabited, with a single palm tree stuck in its ice-cream-colored sand. No waves to speak of, though there is some soft lapping of warm water. A lullaby at the end of the journey.
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