April 2021 | Page 2 | The Common

The Good Donkey

April 26, 2021 Fiction, Issue 21, Issue 21 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry Recordings

The Common Magazine · “The Good Donkey” by Talia Kolluri

I am not pleased. Paint is dripping down my hoof and the colors are muddled together. I shouldn’t complain. I agreed to it, of course.

Hafiz is putting together a zoo. And he asked me to be the zebra.

“You’re a very good donkey, habibi,” he told me three days ago, “but the border is closed, and everyone says prices for using the smuggling tunnels have gone up. I can’t afford the zebra in Damascus, and the one in Cairo is twice that price.” He gestured wildly, scattering my oats. What a waste.

I don’t know much about borders, but I would do anything for Hafiz. He is more than a father to me.

nigrescence

April 26, 2021 Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

By RICARDO WILSON

She is on her knees in the garden. The sun, as of yesterday, an hour early. There are no dead snails in the saucers of beer, though she has finally seen the pale-yellow cabbage butterfly. Searching the half-eaten mustards and turnips, she looks for the caterpillars and their eggs as if she were inspecting a child for lice. Extracts the first, hiding along the stem of the most mature start. Studying its curl on her finger for a breath, perhaps peering its translucence to judge it female, before she presses. Leaf by leaf plant by plant until her fingertips are dirty with the mess.

Annunciation

April 26, 2021 Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

By ALLISON ALBINO

I wonder if anyone ever asked Mary
if she wanted a baby? If she was fine
with skipping the sex and going straight

Sun Through Snow

April 26, 2021 Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

By PETER FILKINS

The Common Magazine · “Sun Through Snow” by Peter Filkins

Turner could have done no better,
nor did he, articulating the light
made now radiant, prismatic:

Adam’s Apple

April 26, 2021 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 21, Issue 21 Fiction, Translation

By LATIFA BAQA
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

I walk in and find the women there in the large hall. I can hear their soft, melodious voices, which means there is no man around. (More accurately: there is no man doing all the talking.) I instinctively head toward them, like an animal finally encountering its species. I take a seat and wait for my turn. Before I came up to the therapist’s clinic, I had run into Fast Lubna—with the hazel eyes, the kohl always smudged, and the newly blonde hair—outside the entrance. She was on the phone. She was dressed in black leather pants and a black leather jacket. I thought she smiled at me, but she didn’t move the phone slightly away from her ear to give me a warm hug as she would have usually done. She used to dress more normally, less severely, before she adopted this style and dyed her long hair blonde. She surprised me. The transformation of the vast majority of women I know since the eighties of the last century has been toward the hijab and extreme modesty, away from modern clothes.