New work by our contributors TINA CANE and TOM PAINE
WORK by Tina Cane
I can’t stop horses as much as you can’t stop horses,”
“Other Horses,” Michael Klein
What is work but a horse is a beast to be one with the broom I bristle
toil tool and trade work is a poem I made is my children is family a broken
With TEOLINDA GERSÃO
Your name: Teolinda Gersão
Current city or town: Lisboa (Lisbon)
How long have you lived here: since 1965
Three words to describe the climate: sunny, mild, pleasant
Best time of year to visit? spring and autumn, but you can come any time
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
It’s a conundrum—where to put the baby in the grime—how to remove him from his blanket and place him on anything in this room. This room is what my husband and I get for $99 a night on Trip Advisor at .2 miles from the Philadelphia airport. The hotel sits in a strangled urban desert—a place bereft of tree, water, flow—a sprawl of light and concrete. This is a hopeless place for trapped people, meant to curb the anxiety about the most unnatural of journeys.
The Common brings you a special two-part series as a preview to Tesserae: Poetry of Community – A Reading & Celebration of Immigrants & New Americans, coming up on Sunday, April 22 3:30–5pm at The Parlor Room in Northampton, MA; free admission. You can view Part One of the series here.
Part Two – featuring poems by Tamiko Beyer, Leslie Marie Aguilar, and Oliver de la Paz.
Finger Lakes Region, New York
I am a trespasser. It’s difficult not to be one when so much of the hills surrounding the Finger Lakes of New York are owned by so many, “somebody else’s.” Even the abandoned Tenny’s Farm, with its heaviness of barren barns and feral fields, is stitched with Posted signs. Nearly daily I hike, or ride my pony, along the top of Grimes Gully with its whispering waterfalls below, to the end of the the Old West Hollow Road: an echo of a carriage road overgrown and barely remembered. It’s not really the end though, it’s a path dismembered by a twelve-foot-high fence that surrounds hundreds of acres of private deer reserve. I press my face to the cold wire, longing for the wide trails that continue inside there. Just being here, though, I’ve passed numerous signs. I am trespassing.
Join us in celebrating Issue 15 of The Common! The evening will feature readings from Liz Arnold, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and translator Lissie Jaquette, followed by a discussion with the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker. This event is free and open to the public.
Curated by SARAH WHELAN
Friday Reads is like a box of chocolates: there’s something for everyone, even the weirdos who read scripts! This month, sample an autobiographical novel, a collection of love poems, and a modernist play.
Recommendations: A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
In March we welcome three poets new to our pages; all three have work forthcoming in the print journal, as well.
Zero Slave Teeth
On the radio I hear about George Washington’s teeth.
A guest says what do you think his teeth were and a host
says wood. I’ve read about Waterloo teeth, how we prowled
battlefields, plucked teeth from young French corpses,
wired them up to make fresh rich people mouths.
With KATIE CORTESE
Your Name: Katie Cortese
Current City or Town: Lubbock, Texas
How Long Have You Lived here: 5 years
Three Words to Describe the Climate: Sunny, windy, dusty
Best time of the year to visit: Every season in Lubbock has its challenges, but I like it best in either May or September when everything is green and flowering, the hottest days are still either in front of us or past, and the wind is slightly less intense (though it never really goes away).
By LEATH TONINO
Sawatch Range of Colorado
I’d been backpacking solo for twenty days in the mountains of Colorado, only a biography of Mozart for company, when my feet finally got the message up to my thumb that they were tired—so blistered, and achy, and sun-deprived and tired. My thumb, being a crafty little digit, waited until the trail crossed a road, then sprang into action with all the springiness a thumb can muster. One minute I was a resolved nature pilgrim, the next a common drifter hitching a ride to junk food.
What pulled up beside me almost instantaneously was not so much a Suburban as a rumbling patchwork of rust and mismatched panels. The tailpipe, or the little left of it, screamed a warning of danger, but its cries fell on my feet’s deaf ears. I stepped to the lowered window, thinking of ice cream and nothing besides ice cream.
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