Passages

By TEOW LIM GOH

Ten miles of concrete can bring you
to different places. Your feet carry you
across the ground, let you

into worlds unlike your own. You go places
you have never been. But what matters
is not where you have been

but what you see. What you choose
to see. Whether you let yourself
see the distance

between what is and what you want to be.

[Purchase Issue 15 here.]

Teow Lim Goh is the author of Islanders, a volume of poems on the history of Chinese exclusion at the Angel Island Immigration Station. Her work has been featured in Tin House, Catapult, PBS NewsHour, Colorado Public Radio, and The New Yorker. She lives in Denver.

Passages

Related Posts

Gray Davidson Carroll's headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Gray Davidson Carroll on “Silent Spring”

GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing.

February 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

MARC VINCENZ
Oh, you genius, you beehive, / you spark, you contiguous line— / all from the same place of origin // where there is no breeze. // All those questions posed … / take no notice, the image / is stamped on your brow, even // as you glare in the mirror, // as the others are orbiting

Excerpt from The Math of Saint Felix

DIANE EXAVIER
I turn thirty-two / the sky is mostly cloudy / over my apartment / facing Nostrand // and all my parents are dead // I am rolling my hips / toward death in a dying / city on a planet dying / just a touch slower than me // and one sister jokes we only need thirty more years