2025 | Page 4 | The Common

Hawk

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

In the park we stopped and looked up at the high branch where the ferruginous hawk ate another winged thing, the torn feathers drifting down. The hawk made a noise, like a little lever of pleasure giving way inside. I thought of the question the choreographer asked her gathered dancers: What do you do in order to be loved? It was as though I’d been holding my breath the whole day, walking beside you. A strong spring light struck us. Next to you on the ground, your shadow looked like crumpled black paper.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Negative Capability

May 5, 2025 Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability”
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey

Tuesday

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By LUCAS SCHAEFER

The morning after Ed Hooley saw a coyote in the supply closet, Bob Alexander declared something smelled rotten inside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.

This was at six a.m. on a Tuesday, midway through abs and stretching. Inside the ring, the eleven members of the First Thing crew sprawled out on foam mats as Terry Tucker, fifty-four, led them through an arduous medley of scissor kicks and side-to-sides, knees-to-your-ears and upside-down bicycle. It was August in Austin, the average age inside the ring was forty-nine, and though it would be hours before a single speck of perspiration would appear on Terry’s left temple, his charges were sopping.

Pie

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By RICK BAROT

I took a class on how to make pie. When one desires tender fruit, a structured crust, gold at the edges, there is no ease. The teacher wore a black apron, serious as the stone inside the fruit. We stood around an industrial table, each with a bowl. Flour, yolk, shortening, sugar. Outside was summer. The oven hummed. What was called for was a teaspoon of salt. Now remove a pinch for the ocean beyond the window, its humid air. Now remove a pinch for what sweats from the fingers in the long kneading. You are always hungry. I’m your blue ribbon. I’m your huckleberry.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

The Wild Geese

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By MORRI CREECH

Where were the wild geese going, slurred across
the yellow sky in mid-December light,
fading into some everglade of memory?
I saw them slip like notions over the pines
in simple distances beyond the winter
as the wind laid the river grasses down,
saw how the strict formations left no trace.

I See a Lot of Robots in Your Future

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By JULIA KOLCHINSKY

& girls so many girls with long locks & red locks & curls & locked
doors you try to break into & out of & bare feet & the streets

you don’t look both ways crossing & all the ways you close your eyes & reach
to find what’s nearest by touch & touch & touch & touch &

A City in Negative Lights

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Issue 29, Translation

By AMY ALKHALIFI
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM

Fardous Loses Her Mind and Invents a New Future

“At the beginning, it was easy. Customers were in and out all day, and money was flowing,” Fardous the soothsayer says to her neighbor Um Khalid after revealing to her that “business is bad.”

December Tanka

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By PHILLIS LEVIN

Light snow, bare branches.
It’s easier now to see
Deep into the woods,
Loss upon loss settling
Under a lattice of ice.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain and Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.

Decapitated

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29 Fiction

By TERESE SVOBODA

We traveled as a group to Kenya on assignment to photograph zebra in complete abstraction, or the pores around the elephant’s flickering eyelid, or herds of giraffe clustered around salt licks like politicians deciding the fate of the country. We also drank. Fred, a Texan beer-sipper, always used a longer lens than the job needed. He worked in advertising, which meant that an assignment like this was his big chance to express himself. Franco bore his drink and our presence sardonically, a finger to the ear and always a story to accompany his glass of wine, usually about a donkey and metaphysics. It wasn’t a donkey after all was often the punchline. He was important enough that he could invite Heinemann to tag along on the trip. Heinemann’s wife was tending to an extremely pregnant NGO daughter, an activity that offered little for him, he said, personally. He was a professional magician elsewhere, not a photographer. But he was also very adept in the academic world, with an air of abstraction that suggested he had cleared collegiate hurdles in boredom. He drank vodka well. As for me, I drank gin and tonics as if they would stop malaria in its tracks. I had a name in photography, but after shooting the body for decades, my work had begun to disappear. A woman the men’s age, I had become invisible, as if I were left in too little fix.

Photography made Heinemann uncomfortable; he was an expert in everything else, or else he pleased his friend Franco by demurring to his opinion. The rest of us declaimed as if we knew every ABC in the book, but really Heinemann was the one we all envied with his academic paycheck, as evidenced by our earnest critiques of his amateurish attempts at taking pictures. Your gloating hyena is too hackneyed, we argued, the baobab against the sunset too obscene, and the dancing women adorned in beads and gold cloth are far too pretty to be pithy. Heinemann laughed and pulled a coin out of Fred’s ear. Advertising! he exclaimed. He settled on photographing the steam pouring over the car engine.