#giftinspo for Cottagecore Girls
—Dispatch from Santa Clarita, California,
nowhere near a cozy forest cottage, August, 2025
Nose heavenward, ears like capsized canoes,
I unbox a silver-gray rabbit, painted to look
metal and heavy. My new useless
bookend. Plastic. Stiff and unsteady—
I would have missed it on a shelf, out shopping
like people used to do, maybe held its weight
Transcript: Cush Rodríguez Moz
CUSH RODRÍGUEZ MOZ speaks to EMILY EVERETT about his essay “Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. The piece chronicles a trip to Villa Epecuén: once a vacation destination for the wealthy in Argentina’s golden age, now a site for disaster tourism after salt-water flooding first ruined and then preserved it. Cush discusses how the piece evolved from simple travelogue to a complex personal essay examining national and personal decline, climate and political change, and our fascination with destruction and decay.
Cush Rodríguez Moz is a journalist, writer and photographer currently based in Madrid. His investigative articles and long-form narrative pieces cover an array of themes that include environmental issues, agriculture and urbanism. His work has appeared in El Malpensante, Altäir, The New Yorker and Climática, among other outlets. He also collaborates regularly with Revista Late. He holds degrees in history, geography and journalism. Prior to Spain, he lived in Italy and Argentina.
Read Cush’s essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/future-remains-the-mysterious-allure-of-a-town-in-ruins.
Read more from Cush at linktr.ee/cush.moz, and follow him on Instagram @cush.moz.
The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.
Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, andMississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.
New poems by ALEKSANDAR HEMON and STEFAN BINDLEY-TAYLOR
This month we bring you new work by writers who also have careers in music.
Table of Contents:
—Aleksandar Hemon, “Snipers”
—Stefan Bindley-Taylor, “Naming the Wind” and “At our first house”
Aleksandar Hemon (left) and Stefan Bindley-Taylor (right)
By EDY POPPY
Reviewed by BRITTA STROMEYER
“For my husband, who has given me everything, even what I didn’t want. (He’s now my ex-husband.)” reads the dedication in Edy Poppy’s award-winning and spicy debut novel Anatomy. Monotony. It’s an irresistible hook, inviting the reader into a novel that explores the author’s experiences in an open marriage, the evolving sense of place as a search for identity, and the adventure and challenges inherent in the act of writing itself:
“I want to write about the people, the loneliness, and the language here. I feel at home but I’m a stranger, don’t belong, can’t express what I truly feel.”
By NEYSA KING
This piece is an excerpt from the novel How to Be Loved.
Cláudia’s eyeliner is dark as earth and heavy as her parrot-red lipstick. As she bends over to speak to me in low tones, her blouse falls open. I don’t know what it means to be attracted to her; I just want to be near her body. But she’s a college student from Rio, and I’m five years old. For the last year she’s been my nanny—dressing me, feeding me while Mom and Dad work. Every other Friday, if I’m good, she shucks me into my two-piece bathing suit with frills on the bottom and a pink butterfly on top and takes me to Singing Beach, where I can play with the skinny-legged sandpipers that the ocean is lava. Run, chase, run, chase, run, chase—my long, dark curls wet and heavy, and my suit bottom sliding down my straight hips—until the sunlight stretches as long and pale as a skeleton across the sand.
Photo by Hannah Stone
Cape May, NJ
Some things we understand before we’ve ever touched them. I swallowed a poppyseed and saw you in my dreams. Summer sweltered. Sweat marked round my ribs, beating with two hearts. Boiled eggs, sharp chives, mayo, cayenne, dill, salt. Summer of salt: we retreat to the seaside of my childhood, rocky and full of my mother’s egg salad.
I
Wondrous, the emptiness so close, close to an absent sea,
only sea-fields, wheat-fields, golden stubble,
though we were walking together on a path to find the sea.
Wandering together under a wide horizon.
On a road called Pas de l’Assassin.
Translated from the Spanish by SARAH THOMAS
Translator’s Note:
In the two decades that I have known Mar Gómez Glez, she has established herself as one of the most memorable and unique voices of her generation of Spanish writers. Mar’s output is impressive in its creativity, complexity, and the diversity of its genres and subjects: three novels, more than twice as many plays, a children’s book, and two non-fiction books (a study of Saint Teresa of Ávila and a cultural history of blood). These works treat a wide variety of topics ranging from pressing political themes to the deeply personal autobiographical content of her novel in vignettes La edad ganada, from which this text is drawn. What all her work shares in common is a deep ethical concern with human experience, the connections forged and broken between us, and our responsibility to others.
Among these diverse works, La edad ganada is one of the most experimental and personal. It brings fresh form to the bildungsroman: standalone chapters offer snapshots of an unnamed protagonist’s coming of age from two to thirty, their sequential numeric titles indicating her age (in the original, this text is titled “veinticuatro” or “twenty-four”). Across the stories, the narrative point of view constantly shifts, at times in daring or surprising ways, but the protagonist’s experience and voice remain at the center of the text. While deeply personal, the work also speaks to deeper ethical and relational imperatives. This chapter, which I have called “Playing Chicken” in the translation, is rooted in cultural specificity—the bureaucracy of Spanish universities, the classic winter stew cocido madrileño—but also explores a story that is all too familiar and universal: of power imbalance, the unspoken expectations articulated just below the surface of what is explicitly said, and the potentially devastating consequences of playing along.
—Sarah Thomas
Playing Chicken
They had arranged to meet in the park at 2 pm sharp. The student arrived at quarter to, and sat on a bench, watching the children play to entertain herself. The air was strangely cold, a springtime chill that came and went.
Daisy Atterbury (left) and July Westhale (right)
DAISY ATTERBURY’s book The Kármán Line poses a question about speculative futures, queerness and space, and ‘a hope for a shared present.’ The Kármán line is defined by Atterbury as “the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. The Kármán line is the edge of space, as opposed to near space, the high altitude region of the atmosphere. When they say altitude, they’re thinking in terms of the human. What is measurable from the ground. Beyond the Kármán line, the Earth’s atmosphere is too thin to support an object in flight.”
By ALEX BEHM
Copenhagen, Denmark
My grandfather sits in a recliner and watches infomercials on television. It is 2:57 in the afternoon on an American Sunday and a man wearing a cheap suit tries selling him the New King James Version Bible in twelve parts on CD.
I call from Copenhagen where the time is 8:57pm and the sun has already set. An electronic operator speaks words in Danish I cannot decipher before the static spindles through air and across several oceans until my grandfather picks up his landline.
Harmony Presbyterian Church, he says into the phone. This is his greeting. No Hello or Can I help you? He has no caller ID and does this to defend himself against telemarketers. He tells me, If you answer with the name of a church, they are not allowed to sell you anything, and then purses his lips and nods his head one time, each time he says this.
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