News & Events | Page 280 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Discontinuous City

May 3, 2013 Essays

Two weeks ago today, I woke up reading an email that Watertown was closed. The Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown police departments had sealed a perimeter. No entrance, no exit. The office was closed. I had started working for a landscape architecture practice in Watertown that Monday, the morning of the Marathon. After three months on the city’s outskirts, writing full-time, at last I had started traveling around Boston and Cambridge. The Lockdown froze the city in its novelty for me.

Eight Belles

May 1, 2013 Dispatches

By CATHERINE JAGOE

The second-place horse in the 2008 Kentucky Derby, Eight

Belles, collapsed with shattered front fetlocks just after

crossing the finish line. She was euthanized on the track.

Maygold

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By VIRGINIA REEVES

The first pest to make itself known in the orchard was the stinkbug, malevolent and focused. It worked at the sap in the fruit, sucking the water from the flesh, leaving behind gnarls and distortions—catfacing, Mona heard it called, though the injured peaches she plucked from her  trees’ branches looked nothing like a cat’s face, but more a woman’s, withered by sun.

Meditation on a Ficus Tree

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By DENISE DUHAMEL

mermaid legs/ whiskers/ open mouth/ callipygian bark/
semen sap/ elbow fold/ knees/ arms stretched above a head/
torso swung upside down/ hair sweeping the ground/
breasts/ cave turned inside out/ toes holding on/
eye socket/ palm/ thumb/ twisting veins/ freckle/ bellybutton/
vulva/ ghost fetus/ nose/ nipple/ thigh/ petrified cloud

Ode to the Coastal Flowers/ Oda a Las Flores de la Costa

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By PABLO NERUDA

The Isla Negra wildflowers
are blooming,
they have no names, some
seem like sand crocuses,
others
illuminate
the ground with yellow lighting.

August

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By ALEXEI TSVETKOV

apples went brown and sizzled on the ground
the instant they touched it and the vain promise
of autumn stayed just that the august was
interminable and the vet was blunt
a month at best he said and that was not
a promise so we farmed the ailing dog
out to the in-laws and just left him there

Dear Darkness

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By ALEXEI TSVETKOV

myrtle our neighbor on the left side had
a headache with her ron the vietnam vet
fading from parkinson’s connie whose house
bulged into our backyard was a nurse who spent
her summer days sun-bathing in the nude

Untitled

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By GIAMPIERO NERI

My father’s bookcase was divided by nationalities of the authors. “The French ones,” my mother would say with some solemnity, indicating the most considerable sector, and perhaps the one most congenial to her. Then came the Russians, preferred by my father.

The bookcase, pride of the family, occupied a room in our apartment, on the second floor of the building on via Volta in Erba.

Untitled

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By GIAMPIERO NERI

Of the few walks we took together, my father and I, I recall well the one to the Torretta. Having loaded our backpacks with food, which consisted of bread and bresaola, we took off at a good clip.

The Torretta, a medieval tower probably for observation, was tumbledown then, and has now vanished.

Untitled

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By GIAMPIERO NERI

By the end of the summer of 1943, a stretch of time that had seemed to me unbelievably long and even more so in my memory, a good-sized colony of strangers had arrived in town.

Then it emerged they were Jewish.