I understood power
as the ability to excite
desire. When I passed
the socialists camped out
in the square in Mexico City
last summer I cringed
in recognition and took a picture
that I texted to my anarchist
in another country.
New poems by ADRIENNE SU, ELEANOR STANFORD, KWAME OPOKU-DUKU, and WILLIAM FARGASON
Table of Contents:
Solitude
By Adrienne Su
My body rebelled
against the amorphousness
of American
motherhood, which asked
me to be available
as if I were five
women: two grandmas,
and the amazed girls saw their bodies equipped with golden plumage, and the wings and feet of birds
I turn over the soil, my son chattering beside me. He wants to talk about time, its intransigency and evasions. Our hands breaking up the clumps, pulling out old roots.
All summer, I sit on the porch, my son appearing, disappearing. Walls of rain or night, of larkspur, bleeding heart. The stone floor long ago lifted from the lion’s den.
Translator’s note: Having children is a way of remaking oneself.
Four Poems By ELEANOR STANFORD
Contents
This month we’re playing in the borderlands, exploring the spaces between categories. Intercontinental love stories; strangers in strange lands; the struggle to remain constant in a world of transience. These books bend genre and their subjects navigate the passages between success and failure, present and past, public and private life—between where they are and where they have in mind.
Recommended:
Middle Men by Jim Gavin, The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger, Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Ben Greenman, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 06 contributors Rowan Moore Gerety and Eleanor Stanford read and discuss their essays “Well-Armed” and “Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde).”
ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews ELEANOR STANFORD
Eleanor Stanford is the author of the memoir História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands, and of a poetry collection, The Book of Sleep. Stanford’s essay “Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde)” was published in Issue No. 06 of The Common. Fellow Philadelphian Zinzi Clemmons chatted with Stanford about poetic form, the importance of language, and ways to feel at home in the world.
aa (pronounced “ah-ah”)
ORIGIN: <Hawaiian, ‘a’, “to burn.”
1. Lava that has a rough, jagged, spiny, and generally clinkery surface.
2. How to gloss this sharp language, its reflective surfaces, its chinks?
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