Unincorporated Arapahoe County, Colorado
Through mantle, earth, gender, air
through false stories and true
undistracted by pectin, pucker, time
scale, sugar, seed, dripped rainbow of
oil, prism, crushed berry residue,
om of home, acid, oxygen song—
I grip jelly jars to my eyes
mock binocular my way to You—
By SONYA GILDEA
When Catherine woke and turned the light on, she was shaking, her whole body was cold. This, she thought, is aftershock. She had been fine all afternoon: a little sleepy, but fine. Now she was trembling. Her feet were freezing.
She put on a cardigan, found warm socks and turned the central heating on. It was still dark and too early to let the dogs out. She made coffee, stronger than usual, and sat at the kitchen table without putting on the main light. She liked this time of day. If the tide was coming in, the air was salty and fresh, and you could watch daylight starting out on the water past the rocks.
Curated by ELLY HONG
This month’s round of Friday Reads features two unforgettable collections of short fiction recommended by the TC team. Read on for a sparkling exploration of sapphic love, and dark tales where Japanese folklore is given new life.
Recommendations: Amora by Natalia Borges Polesso, translated by Julia Sanches and Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Poems by TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
Translated from the Slovenian by BRIAN HENRY
Translator’s Note
Both of the Tomaž Šalamun poems in this feature come from books published in the early 1970s: “On the border” first appeared in Amerika (1972), and “Trieste” first appeared in Arena (1973). “On the border” demonstrates Šalamun’s newfound engagement with the United States (he was a fellow at Iowa’s International Writing Program from 1971 to 1972), while “Trieste” is set in a city that Šalamun knew well since it is about ten miles from his hometown of Koper.
Film by IULI GERBASE
Review by HANNAH GERSEN
A title card at the beginning of Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature, The Pink Cloud, informs viewers that its screenplay was written in 2017, and that it was filmed in 2019. What follows is a movie so in tune with the events and moods of 2020 that you would be forgiven for finding this level of prescience impossible to believe. The premise is simple: a toxic pink cloud formation suddenly appears in the sky. Its vapors are deadly, killing people after ten seconds. With only a few minutes of warning, an unnamed Brazilian city is locked down. People are ordered to go indoors immediately; if they are not at home, they are to go into the nearest building, whether it’s a bakery, a grocery store, or the apartment complex they happened to be passing by. Giovana and Yago, the couple at the center of the movie, are on the balcony of Giovana’s apartment when they hear the news, recovering after a late night of partying. We quickly learn that they don’t know each other well; they are waking up from a one-night stand that has been extended indefinitely.
Transcript: Julia Cooke Podcast
Julia Cooke speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Past and Future on Rapa Nui,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Julia talks about her trip to Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island, a place famous for the mysterious moai statues that dot the remote landscape. She also discusses the island’s complicated and unknowable history, her earlier work as a journalist, and her latest book, which chronicles stories from Pan Am stewardesses during the Jet Age.
“Newspaper Transferral on Plaster” by Hasami Ho (2020)
Location: Hong Kong
on the sudden closure of Apple Daily, the biggest pro-democracy press in Hong Kong
1.
We see the newspaper for tomorrow, not tomorrow
It’s already midnight. Today that is. News that stays
warm and inky on our fingertips at 2:30 am.
This piece is excerpted from a story in The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken, a guest at Amherst College’s 2022 LitFest. Click here to purchase.
Even Punch and Judy were in love once. They knew the exact clockwise adjustment required to fit their preposterous profiles together for a kiss, her nose to the left of his nose, his chin to the left of her chin. Before the slapstick and the swazzle, the crocodile and the constable, before above all the baby: they’d known how to be sweet to each other.
This piece is excerpted from The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a guest at Amherst College’s 2022 LitFest. Click here to purchase.
We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves. Less than nothing, we also saw nothing as we crouched blindly in the unlit belly of our ark, 150 of us sweating in a space not meant for us mammals but for the fish of the sea. With the waves driving us from side to side, we spoke in our native tongues. For some, this meant prayer; for others, curses. When a change in the motion of the waves shuttled our vessel more forcefully, one of the few sailors among us whispered, We’re on the ocean now. After hours wind- ing through river, estuary, and canal, we had departed our motherland.
The navigator opened the hatch and called us onto the deck of our ark, which the uncaring world denigrated as merely a boat. By the lopsided smile of the crescent moon, we saw ourselves alone on the surface of this watery world. For a moment we were giddy with delight, until the rippling ocean made us giddy in another way. All over the deck, and all over one another, we turned ourselves inside out, and even after nothing remained we continued to heave and gasp, wretched in our retching. In this manner we passed our first night on the sea, shivering with the ocean breezes.
Dawn broke, and in every direction we saw only the infinitely receding horizon. The day was hot, with no shade and no respite, with nothing to eat but a mouthful and nothing to drink but a spoonful, the length of our journey unknown and our rations limited. But even eating so little, we still left our human traces all over the deck and in the hold, and were by evening awash in our own filth. When we spotted a ship near the horizon at twilight, we screamed ourselves hoarse. But the ship kept its distance. On the third day, we came across a freighter breaking through the vast desert of the sea, a dromedary with its bridge rising over its stern, sailors on deck. We screamed, waved, jumped up and down. But the freighter sailed on, touching us only with its wake. On the fourth and fifth days, two more cargo ships appeared, each closer than the one before, each under a different flag. The sailors pointed at us, but no matter how much we begged, pleaded, and held up our children, the ships neither swerved nor slowed.
(Amherst, MA—February 21, 2022)—The Common, Amherst College’s award-winning literary
magazine, announces the addition of three new members to its Board of Directors: Kate Nintzel,
Lee Oglesby and Tara Safronoff. Willie Perdomo, The Common’s former Interviews Editor, will
join the magazine’s Editorial Board.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.
