The girl & I ate spaghetti
and carrot sticks
and we colored with crayons
mazes & Pokémon & cats
and rainbows & shooting stars
and then I gave her a bath,
which is the easiest way to
look at my phone
while I’m on duty.
| We said a prayer for the rats and fleas as the plague abated. We laid a wreath for Justinian. The streets of London were no longer smoke-choked, just smoking, and Rome started to smell more like Rome. At least whoever remembered “before” said as much. In the last days of the plague, the days that followed the days that had been called “last,” we made a sport of showing up at restaurants where we had never been beautiful enough to get a table, just to see if people still ate at tables, or if the food tasted like anything. We appeared at the homes of our favorite people to see if they were around, too, or if they had changed, or if they could be unchanged. We moved slowly through the halls of near-empty museums, each of us indistinguishable from the art, to be touched only with the eyes from a safe Kantian distance. As the plague’s grip on our lives slackened, we slackened too, like a body pretending it can will itself back into sleep. We prepared for travel, arranged our documents, scheduled shots. We packed—clothes, books—and packed—the spider plant with all its apostles, anything that might spoil in our absence—and kept on packing. It didn’t matter that we had no idea where we were going. This time we would be more careful to leave none of ourselves behind. |
—after “Environment for Three Overweight Parakeets”
You thought you were seeking beauty
in that plain, little box. Fixed your face
to the aperture. Inside, a chaos
of swimming through stones, doll arms cocked
After years without a single dream
of my dead son, he walks into
the living room where I am standing
at the window and holds me tightly
So simple is the soul
a house finch can haunt its innermost
ever, not for an hour, not for an era, but a
different kind of forever, as in, as in,
as in the dream of an infinite lever, & a lamb
lifts up a mountain by stepping on the end
of an endless branch propped beneath
the stone—. That dream—. Of the long ago
then, a sort of once-upon-a-
time, when the pear sang out the finch’s tune
& desire began again its how-to-
see, how-to-hear, mystery burden so hard
to bear—. Then God was a word
for the perfection that no one could name—.
A new year of trees, and in the yard
the rosemary is trying to live again,
its spines broken, darkened from the frost.
I don’t know whether to water it
or leave the plant to fortune.
Sometimes my love can drown a thing.
This month, we’re pleased to bring you poems by contributors DAVID BARBER and DAVID LEHMAN.
Table of Contents
David Barber (left), David Lehman (right). Photos courtesy of the authors.
By DALIA TAHA
Translated from the Arabic by SARA ELKAMEL
Ramallah Landscape, photograph by Dalia Taha
Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine
Enter Zakaria Mohammed’s Balcony
On Zakaria Mohammed’s balcony,”
we notice just how close
the settlement is.
Then we ignore it and drown
in conversation, its lights
swelling before us
the way a car’s headlights
flood your whole existence
before its body of steel crashes into you.
By DAVID MCGLYNN
Review by NICOLE SCHRAG
David McGlynn’s new novel-in-stories unfolds on and around the campus of the fictional Buchanan College in Hanover, Wisconsin, a school not unlike McGlynn’s home institution of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Liberal Arts follows the lives of professors and students, alumni, community members, and friends and relations of all of the above over the course of four academic years.
By BRAIS LAMELA
Review by ZARA KARSCHAY
It is 1939. Spain is emerging bruised and broken from its Civil War as a plaything for Franco’s crushing rule. People are hungry. The country’s agriculture and rail networks are in shambles. Citizens go where the work is, leaving expanses of rural land unpopulated. Intending to reform Spain’s agrarian economy and redistribute the population across the country, the regime’s “New Colonization” policy (la nueva politica de colonización) draws up plans for several hundred new settlements to be built across the whole of Spain. Some move voluntarily, others are forced to do so, because their own villages are submerged to create water reservoirs. Over three decades, more than fifty-thousand people are displaced.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.