By SARA ELKAMEL
Camels on the Moon, 2021, Mixed media and collage on cardboard. Artwork by Sara Elkamel.
Cairo, Egypt
When you’re not looking
I try on your big brown shoes,
pick a spot to run to, practice ducking
from winged pellets on the street—
By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by MADELINE EDWARDS
Morocco has long been associated in the Arab imagination with magic and superstition, casting off mystical curses and exorcising jinn from the body. The word “al-Moghrabi” (“the Moroccan”) has itself become yet another qualification claimed by those who work in this parallel world, adding it to their names, some going so far as to christen themselves “Sheikh from Morocco.” These are the men one hears about from time to time, those who help ancient treasure-seekers get their hands on spell-protected troves, perhaps of the sort guarded by serpents.
Curated by ISABEL MEYERS
We’re celebrating a successful spring issue launch by showcasing book recommendations from our Issue 21 contributors. Their picks, which range from a poetry collection exploring Latino identity to a memoir documenting incarceration in the 1850s, are diverse in form yet collectively poignant and timely. Make sure to read the April installment of Friday Reads, featuring more picks from our Issue 21 contributors, and pick up a copy of the spring issue.
With about 15 kilometers to go before Gyumri, we start having car trouble. Moments earlier, the taxi driver was passing other cars like a madman passing for sane. Now the tiny, rusted Opel is making a humming and stalling noise whenever he adjusts the gear. Each time, he tosses up his right hand in a “What can I do?” gesture.
“Your teeth hurt because you have some recession,” says my dental hygienist. I’m leaned back in the chair, gritty-mouthed from a cleaning. I’ve never had this problem before, so it takes me a minute to get what she means.
KERRIN MCCADDEN interviews MATT W. MILLER
Selected by Major Jackson as the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize winner for his sophomore collection, Club Icarus, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Matt Miller published Tender the River this year with Texas Review Press. He is the winner of the 2019 Nimrod International Review’s Pablo Neruda Prize and has published poems in the Harvard Review, The Rumpus, and SouthwestReview. Miller also wrote The Wounded for the Water and Cameo Diner: Poems. He currently teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.
In this interview conducted by Kerrin McCadden, you’ll find a poet engaged in an exploration of rivers as national symbols of disparity, dispossession, hope, and boundaries. The meaning of “being from somewhere,” or “home” is thoroughly examined in Miller’s responses, as it is in his poetry. McCadden’s inquiry ignites the discussion until it becomes a lesson on craft, self-reflection, the history of a place, and the biography of a country as told by a poet who can make cobblestone and metal dance, who can teach us how to listen when memory tries to speak.
Deborah Lindsay Williams speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “‘You Like to Have Some Cup of Tea?’ and Other Questions About Complicity and Place,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Williams talks about living and writing in Abu Dhabi, traveling to South Africa with her family, and how narrow the western view of these places can be, often simplifying very complex issues of racial hierarchy, economics, culture, and history. She also discusses her novel-in-progress, The Corset and the Veil, based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, who fled England in 1809 in search of alternatives to her life as an impoverished aristocrat.
Poem by SILVIA GUERRA
Translated from the Spanish by JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL and JEANNINE MARIE PITAS
Poem appears in both Spanish and English.
Silvia Guerra
Translators’ Note
“Moss on a Smooth Rock” is from Un mar en madrugada (A Sea at Dawn), by the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra, published in 2018 by Hilos Editora, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The English version of this book is forthcoming from Eulalia Books in 2022.
Guerra’s work is notorious for its complexity, its concreteness of image and abstraction of thought, and its convention-defying syntax, capitalization and punctuation. With a long-standing interest in linguistics and psychology as well as a deep affinity for the natural world, Guerra’s poems go beyond the self in an effort to imagine the world from the standpoint of other beings, living and nonliving. For centuries, humans have assumed a monopoly on consciousness, even arrogantly denying the subjective experience of other mammals. But scientists are at last confirming what any dog or cat owner has always known: animals are not unfeeling automata any more than we are. But while only some creatures are proven to be sentient, can we be so certain that others are not? “How can we be so sure that plants feel no pain?” asks Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. What about rocks? Guerra dares to imagine they are.
By ARIEL CHU
Taipei, Taiwan, December 2020
The three of us—Frances, Jay, and I—live in this rain-slick city, concrete buildings stained with runoff. At night, the streets stretch like black pools, glossy with reflected traffic lights. We stumble around half-closed night markets with our snapped umbrellas and damp socks. Our pockets weighted with bruised change, we eat charred oyster mushrooms crusted with cumin and rose salt, waiting out the rain under fluorescent storefront awnings.
Click here to purchase your print or digital copy, starting at just $7.
Click here to browse the Table of Contents.
Love Issue 21’s portfolio of stories and art from Morocco? Donate to support The Common’s mission to feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world, including their translators!
Interested in teaching Issue 21 in your class? Click here to explore your options and resources.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.
Celebrating 15 Years