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
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.
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.
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.
choose your own adventure,
in Scenario one, you step out of your office, crossing the unremarkable hall into the Men’s Toilet, taking in the little hieroglyph of the stick figure with pants on the door. This is exercise, a break from computering.
By DAVID LEHMAN
Mother died today. That’s how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today.
By DAVID LEHMAN
Remember rotary phones?
What did we do back then
if we didn’t have a phone
and had to walk a mile
to get to the bus stop?
Remember telephone booths?
Remember when the question was
how many college kids can fit into one telephone booth?
By DAVID LEHMAN
In the bronze distance the last shepherds wander.
The last just man is an angry sinner
Who leaves without a word after a deafening dinner.
The flag of his desire is waving his banner.
![[What They Were Building…]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/5428199672_e5b9f562f6_m.jpg)
A fine kettle of fish, an ancient Mesopotamia
unearthed anew. Mystic cities, the press
of fertile crescents,
thighs wide like to lay seed in. Literal rivers.
By YANG JIAN
He was old.
She, too, was old.
Their years, like lightning, slit the heart of the passerby.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.