2026 | Page 4 | The Common

Guava Paste

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

Gustavo’s cinder block bungalow has no windows, so he’s surprised when he steps out at half past dawn to find a man in an olive uniform digging post holes for a semi-assembled fence scattered in the dusty yard. The soldier stands, puffs his chest, and dusts off his brass buttons. He is young, tall, and handsome—some proud mother’s son. Gustavo is old, bent, and ugly as the day he was born.

Instant Karma

October 26, 2026 Essays, Issue 32, Issue 32 Essays

By RIMA BRUSI
Translated from the Spanish by JESSICA POWELL

Excerpted from Phantoms

In January 1970, two months before my conception, John Lennon and Yoko Ono shaved their heads, and a few weeks later they released the single “Instant Karma!”

If this thing I’m writing were a script, my parents’ acid-filled days on New York’s Lower East Side would be accompanied by this song. This is what I’m thinking about today as I talk to my mother, Teté, on the phone. This is mainly how we communicate: in-person visits rarely go well for us. In fact, our life together has always been more or less a disaster. We maintain our relationship, what remains of it, with the help of the telephone and letters.

A New Color in the Prism of Light

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER

       We had a quarrel, melee, detonation of hurt—
fisticuffs of invisible disfiguration in the countryside of Spain.
I slept that evening on a reclining lawn chair under the stadium of the sky.
You stayed in the bed, roof overhead. The next morning you left
in an economy red rental car for the village where you joined
a Catholic procession, walked amongst men carrying a wooden saint
above their heads down narrow cobblestoned streets and alleyways.

This is How it Begins

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By ELVIS BEGO

Brunch nearly over, talk getting punctuated by lulls, her mother, trim and elegant in her pastel widowhood, letting father go so easily, it seems to Josephine, now asks her if she is thinking about a child.

“No,” comes the answer, but too quick, too reflexive. It’s too late to take it back, but she makes the attempt anyway, and says, “Well, it occurs to me now and then, but Ismar, you know….” She doesn’t finish the sentence, and her mother knows to look away to give her time to change the subject, which she doesn’t. Instead she says, “I will, of course, have to think about it, if it is ever to happen.”

Mark Us

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By SHANE MORAN

Hiding at Stolly’s in the Marais,
I asked Sara, the Martinican bartender,
for a Cheap Blonde in English.

After a tap of glass on plastic, those six euros gone,
I watched the Rams and the Panthers
in the mirror cornered above the bar.

Knife Baby

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By IDE AMARI THOMPSON

my Grammy taught me right
from conception, her voice
iron & honey in my bones
endless like the alto line
of a Zion Convection Choir
full & bodied, darker than
than the mouth of the sea

Babysitter

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By ANNA HOGELAND

The girl & I ate spaghetti
and carrot sticks
and we colored with crayons
mazes & Pokémon & cats
and rainbows & shooting stars
and then I gave her a bath,
which is the easiest way to
look at my phone
while I’m on duty.

Of Diverting and Diversions

October 26, 2026 Issue 32, Issue 32 Poetry, Poetry

By BENJAMIN PALOFF

We said a prayer for the rats and fleas as the plague abated. We laid a wreath for Justinian. The streets of London were no longer smoke-choked, just smoking, and Rome started to smell more like Rome. At least whoever remembered “before” said as much. In the last days of the plague, the days that followed the days that had been called “last,” we made a sport of showing up at restaurants where we had never been beautiful enough to get a table, just to see if people still ate at tables, or if the food tasted like anything. We appeared at the homes of our favorite people to see if they were around, too, or if they had changed, or if they could be unchanged. We moved slowly through the halls of near-empty museums, each of us indistinguishable from the art, to be touched only with the eyes from a safe Kantian distance. As the plague’s grip on our lives slackened, we slackened too, like a body pretending it can will itself back into sleep. We prepared for travel, arranged our documents, scheduled shots. We packed—clothes, books—and packed—the spider plant with all its apostles, anything that might spoil in our absence—and kept on packing. It didn’t matter that we had no idea where we were going. This time we would be more careful to leave none of ourselves behind.