New Poems by Our Contributors
R. ZAMORA LINMARK | Two Poems Composed After Watching Pedro Almodovar’s Flicks While Suffering From Insomnia
| “Red Boots”
| “Volver”
AMA CODJOE | “The Beekeeper’s Husband”
VALERIE DUFF | “Gentrified”
a “mixed-use development”—huge shopping mall—in Bonifacio Global City, Metro Manila
Between the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and The Body Shop
a station of the Cross. On a trodden lawn browning into
desert, two lines are formed for shoppers to be Christ-like.
Christ-lite, puns the Pinoy. The devout come forward to suffer,
put their suffering on display. They’d strap a stretch of varnished
four-by-four across their shoulders, ropes tied around their wingspan
arms, the weight of sins redeemed by Jesus on his march to Calvary.
At The Common we’re welcoming spring with new poetry by our contributors. (Be sure to listen to the audio link to Megan Fernandes’ “White People Always Want to Tell Me…,” read by the author.)
Books burning 3:39 a.m.
Chapter 6, Don Quixote.
Touch-me-nots
Wilting-in-progress.
It’s only 6 a.m. and already my sun
salutation is ten minutes behind
mountain standard time just means more
Celebrate the advent of spring with new poems by seven of our spectacular contributors.
The boy in the labyrinth bends to the darkness. Closes his eyes. Imagines that it lies to him. Because it is full of lies. Because at the center of the darkness is a man who is also a bull. And he is curled up at the hub of it all. The boy thinks about the man-bull padding his way along the slick corridors, rubbing his sides against the hewn edges of basalt. Here and there a tuft of fur snags, yanked out in patches. The minotaur nudges along the way the sightless fishes swim up with the waters of the underworld, pulled by the current, the waters sucked their mouths and on through their gills. To the fish, it’s as if the current were a thing with a mind. It enters the mouth and leaves it according to its will. And in the labyrinth the will is forever wishing to be let in.
The boy in the labyrinth leans into the dark’s sweet kiss. Cave-ins from somewhere in the tunnels send gusts of wind into the boy’s face. The boy imagines a wheel spins in his brain that makes the cavern shake. The rhythm of it turns in the spirals of the boy’s ear. Sound made thicker in the dark. Sound, absolute—and pitch heightened by the boy’s hunger. The fury of his mind honed from the underground, he thinks he hears wind through the pinnate wings of gulls far above the tunnels. Imagines a cart above, heavy with fruit for the afternoon bazaars. His dreams his teeth piercing a plucked grape’s skin. Incisors splitting in half, the soft brown seed. His mind stretches beyond its elastic point. Bends to what the dark gives.
This month we are featuring eight new poems by four The Common contributors:
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