This month we are happy to bring you “the decorations,” a meditation on Monet at Giverny, by long-time TC-contributor PETER FILKINS.
Peter Filkins
Photo courtesy of the author.
Medicine Lake (Sáttítla Highlands National Monument)
The highway is nearly empty;
the mid-June air still crisp.
There is snow on the roadside,
to the west are fire scars.
If I slowed the car, I might relax into
grief. But I am lost.
Allison Pitinii Davis (left) and Rosanna Young Oh (right)
ALLISON PITINII DAVIS and ROSANNA YOUNG OH explore how Davis’ personal connection to Youngstown, Ohio and scholarly interest in labor inspired her debut novella, Business. They discuss representing the Rust Belt in literature, their identities as eldest daughters who worked for their family businesses, and the dignity and ethos of the working-class communities that raised them. Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of the poetry collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk , Poppy Seeds, and Business, a novella in Agency 3: Novellas . She serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Ohio State University.
By THOMAS EMPL
Translated by ISABEL FARGO COLE
The ferryman wrenched the gangplank out of its mount, heaved a breath and hooked it between the boat and the dock. During the brief ride we didn’t say a word; he didn’t recognize us. On the coast, to the east of the town, a military jet took off and dipped straight into a breakneck loop to head the other way, trailing its sonic boom.
I’d shaved the night before. Mouth open, I fingered my smooth skin. Rough lines ran from my nostrils to the corners of my mouth, like incisions. My ears looked huge. When I got up in the morning, my mirror image startled me. It was as if someone had hung up one of those photos I never looked at, showing that out-of-place apprentice, expressionless at the joiner’s bench. I didn’t recognize myself until I heard my voice.
It is Easter weekend in a Catholic majority country. It’s Friday, and it feels like the whole world is counting down and holding its breath, waiting for a miracle they know will always come. Out here, though, Catholicism feels like a relic, a prop in an old mountain town with one main square. Something out of the Wild West, if such existed in Latin America. Old men sit around the square selling handmade tiles, reselling fake name-brand sports gear. A fine layer of dust covers everything.
Acclaimed TC contributor LAUREN GROFF speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her new story collection, Brawler, out this month from Riverhead, and her origins as a writer at Amherst College, where The Common is based. She also discusses how a story collection comes together over many years, how working with her longtime agent Bill Clegg has shaped her work, and what she’s working on now and next. Groff’s work appears most often in The New Yorker these days, but The Common published a story of hers in Issue 01, more than 15 years ago.
This month we welcome SHANE MORAN to our pages for the first time, and we welcome back FATIMAH ASGHAR; both poets have poems forthcoming in the print journal. Gratitude to both poets from all of us at TC.
Table of Contents:
—Fatimah Asghar: “[madness]” and “[pagamento]”
—Shane Moran: “Cedar of Lebanon” and “Les Docks / Chatelet”
This poem is republished from Water & Salt by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
Do not name your daughters Shaymaa,
courage will march them
into the bullet path of dictators.
Do not name them Sundus,
the garden of paradise calls out to its marigolds,
gathers its green leaves up in its embrace.
Do not name your children Malak or Raneem,
angels want the companionship of others like them,
their silvery wings trailing the filth of jail cells,
the trill of their laughter a call to prayer.
These poems are republished from suddenly we by Evie Shockley, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
perched
i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.
By RACHEL HADAS
Reviewed by REEVE LINDBERGH
Rachel Hadas is a close friend, someone I have known since the early 1970’s, and a summer neighbor in rural Vermont. She lives in a house that has belonged to her family, one generation following the other for many decades. Her new book, Pastorals, is an exquisitely written collection of brief reflections and meditations essentially but not exclusively centered on the house.
“Can one feel nostalgic for the present, especially when it’s layered so palpably over the past?” The writer asks herself this at the beginning of the book. Within the present as she lives and writes are the unseen presences of those who have visited or inhabited the same dwelling in the same place. They are not exactly ghosts but instead “the presence of an absence,” something Hadas feels at odd moments indoors or out: while going up the stairs; in the midst of picking blackberries on the hill; on the way down the dirt road to the mailbox. She likens these “seasonal phantoms” in her summer house to the ghosts in Walter De La Mere’s poem “The Listeners,” a poem that had puzzled but did not frighten her when she read it as a child. Readers of Pastorals will learn quickly that Hadas’s memory is filled with the poetry and prose of every age and nation along with her own beloved family ghosts.
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