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Podcast: David Moloney on “Counsel”

December 8, 2020 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Writer David Moloney speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Counsel,” which appears in Issue 19 of The Common. “Counsel” is an excerpt from Moloney’s novel-in-stories, Barker House, set in a correctional facility in New Hampshire. The book follows nine correctional officers over the course of one year on the job. Moloney discusses his own experiences as a correctional officer in a New Hampshire facility, and the work of turning those complex experiences into stories for the novel. Barker House was published by Bloomsbury in April 2020, so this conversation also includes discussion of what it’s like to publish during a pandemic.

Kikawa

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By LANDA WO

The Common Magazine · Kikawa (Landa wo)

“Grief is never more than a house being rebuilt.”
Ntolle Mbuyi¹

Little Cabindan history
All the Cabindan strategies were there
To mount the portrait of a free Cabinda.

The historic chief discoursed on education
The Cabindan earth sketched a faint smile.

Goddamn

July 15, 2020 Dispatches, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER

Music by ABRAHAM KATZ

The Common Magazine · Goddamn

Northern Israel-Palestine

The chunk of the ball
On the cracked blacktop
And our torsos so covered
In sweat nearby the sea
Swells and the smell seeps
Into our hair and the air

A List of His Flaws

May 8, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By PETER MISHLER

Single-headed.

Flowering inwardly.

Barely felt in the birth canal.

Medical marketer.

Sick with planet.

Offering

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By TARA SKURTU

It was the first time I’d lived
with a man, and I wanted him

to translate the name of our street.
He was holding my cold fist

in his own, and we were on
Ofrandei, in the middle of unpaved

Bragadiru, Romania, on our way
home. It’s something you give

to get something—like a sacrifice.
Like what you do for a god.

Antipode

April 17, 2019 Fiction, Issue 17, Issue 17 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio

By RIVER ADAMS

“Miss Val! Miss Val!” A swarm of five-year-olds buzzes around me in the kindergarten playroom. Marni is standing in the middle, feet planted, lower lip sucked in, staring down her blood-coated finger from under her scrunched-up eyebrows as though the finger should have known better. This is leftover hubbub from bigger and scarier trouble in the courtyard, which involved a stuffed monkey, the edge of the sandbox, and a superficial but profusely bleeding head wound, but the ambulance has already left, whisking away the lollipop-loaded victim, and the droplets of blood are being cleaned up outside the courtyard doors.

Malibu Beach

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JENNIFER JEAN

—for my brother Joey

What if there were no light, he wondered. Just sound & scent owning the night, without the invasive

Surf Shop green neon, or PCH streetlamps glowering at everyone.
Their glint was wrong, false, while the waves sounded
like aloe on a burn, a quick fix.
Some blue & some red lights also flooded the water—flashed

Baby Was Not Fine

October 29, 2018 Fiction, Issue 16, Issue 16 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio

By MINDY MISENER

Right before Baby finished ninth grade, Jerry (Baby’s dad) announced that Baby and Carla (Baby’s older sister) would work for him that summer. Baby thought it was a great idea. She would much rather landscape for Jerry than work at one of the three pizza/sub joints in town, or at a basketball camp for kids, which was most of what of her teammates were doing.

Jerry was six-three (two inches taller than Baby) and had a thick mustache and a laugh that rattled fine china. He’d built the house they lived in. In church he sang the loudest and the most out of tune. Six nights a week he did a hundred push-ups. He never took a sick day. It was true what everyone said, that Jerry was the most hardworking, honest man in Waldo County, Maine. The other thing people said was he didn’t suffer fools, but Baby was not one hundred percent sure what this meant, so she couldn’t say if she agreed.

Land Not Theirs

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays, Podcasts & Audio

By MADISON DAVIS

We are driving through downtown Columbus, away from the Greyhound station. I spent fifteen hours on a bus traveling from New York City to visit for Christmas, a holiday, my mother reminds me, that is not even about Jesus anymore. This is a thought she has reiterated over the years, yet it never prevented her from partaking in the holiday during my lifetime. The absence of a decorative tree and gifts reflected a lack of money, not a rejection of the commodification of religion.

Offstage, Christ

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By KRISTINA FAUST
Winner of the 2018 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.

The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.

All posts tagged: Audio

Podcast: David Moloney on “Counsel”

Kikawa

Goddamn

A List of His Flaws

Offering

Antipode

Malibu Beach

Baby Was Not Fine

Land Not Theirs

Offstage, Christ

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