All posts tagged: 2025

Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins

By CUSH RODRÍGUEZ MOZ

“… [C]atastrophe is not something awaiting as in the future, something that can be avoided with well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in (not only) its most basic ontological sense is something that always-already happened, and we, the surviving humans, are what remains …. Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic.” 

Slavoj Žižek  
Apocalyptica, “From Catastrophe to Apocalypse… and Back” 

Two trees next to graveyard

Turntables coated in rust and salt. 

Illuminated beneath halogen lamps and stacked on one another like the layers of a wedding cake, the vintage record players boast a thick icing of sodium chloride and iron oxide, the granularity of which almost perfectly emulates the breading of a recently fried chicken finger. 

Instead of occupying a warehouse shelf, a basement box, or a landfill, these outdated music makers ended up in a museum display case as witnesses to a singular event that some would define as catastrophic, others tragic, others fascinating. The museum, installed in a train station that hasn’t housed a locomotive for decades, commemorates the flooding and destruction of the town where it is located: Villa Epecuén. 

Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins
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Waiting for the Call I Am

By WYATT TOWNLEY

Not the girl
            after the party
waiting for boy wonder

            Not the couple
after the test
           awaiting word

Not the actor
            after the callback
for the job that changes everything

            Not the mother
on the floor
            whose son has gone missing       

I am the beloved
and you are the beloved

            We’re all beside ourselves
            as the phone is beside ourselves

One hand grips the menu
the other covers the eyes

            Now the phone rings
            it is singing on the table

To the dog across the room
to the waitress who is waiting

            To the cat on the carpet
            to the couple in the next booth

But the heart is in the cupboard
breaking the dishes

 

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

 

Wyatt Townley is poet laureate emerita of Kansas and has published six books. Her work has been read on NPR and has appeared in journals from Newsweek to The Paris Review, and Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Commissioned poems hang in libraries including the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of the Hubble.

Waiting for the Call I Am
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Ellen

By ELSA LYONS

Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.

Ellen
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Lawrence Joseph: New Poems

By LAWRENCE JOSEPH

Ontologies

The love the love that massively seizes me,

                                 the typewriter’s
ribbon needs replacing,

                                 the great imperial
power game the price of oil,

a call, a response, I know you know
how precious to care is, the voice on the record on

the turntable is singing.

Lawrence Joseph: New Poems
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Late Orison

By REBECCA FOUST

Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,
the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,

the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually
living it. This time around, let the only fireworks

Late Orison
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The Epiphany in the Ordinary: An Interview with Teju Cole

Teju Cole at Amherst LitFest 2025

Teju Cole at LitFest 2025

For TEJU COLE, prose, poetry, and photography tug against and bleed into one another. At the tenth anniversary of Amherst College’s LitFest, on March 1, 2025, Cole spoke with The Common’s Editor in Chief JENNIFER ACKER about his novel Tremor, his approach to genre-bending, and the role of writers and photographers in bearing witness to catastrophe.  

The Epiphany in the Ordinary: An Interview with Teju Cole
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Anti-Aubade

By GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL

November 6th, 2024

I wake in the night, check the news. Watch you
turn in your sleep, rest your cheek on my chest.
How everything and also this: the heat of your skin,
hand wrapping my waist, the off-beat of our breaths
finding rhythm in the dark.

In the kitchen, I cry to the sound of my mother’s sobs.
Count the injections I have left before the vials run out.
There is no point in asking how, in asking why. Empire
does not answer questions. Genocide does not answer
questions—the answers were right there.

At the train station, the man next to me cries, 
turns his face to meet my own. Somehow, the sun
is shining. A dog barks. Someone laughs. Everything
fragments. A mother & daughter step up to the tracks,
squeeze each other’s hands.

 

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

 

Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, nonbinary writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of Western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places.

Anti-Aubade
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In Another Version

By ELIZABETH METZGER

They walk to the ocean, talk about all the relationships
            that have fallen apart around them.
So many women they know pursued love
            and risked their chance for children.
The sound her hand makes against his sleeve
            is the sound of palm trees.

In Another Version
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