He or she was hard-wired
to calculate
in nanoseconds, light years; to climb
summit to summit above
the squat mud settlements, and oversee
the pyramid poised on pyramid
By RACHEL HADAS
It seems I had to come this far to see
a puppy rooting in a pile of garbage,
scarlet blossoms on a poinsettia tree.
By RACHEL HADAS
In Richard’s attic, I
swung on a swing suspended from a rafter
and listened to two fables
read by my host in a voice that sometimes broke.
By DENIS HIRSON
and it all begins
and it will never cease
—Mxolisi Nyezwa
This story begins on a lake in the Berkshires, up among the low hills and wild blue turkeys and deep woods, up in the northeast before you get to Canada. There I am with my daughter, pulling a rowing boat out across the sand and onto the weed-thick water.
When I saw the man tuck the boy
under his arm like a chicken
or a football, it made me
remember how after one week
of pre-season my youngest declared
his body was all wrong,
insufficient to take down boys
he needed taken down
By BEN MAZER
xv
No mystery if the cats gather as this strange encounter
should have come to have emblematized the city:
for of all those who passed and paid homage to their peer
only you remained, after the room was clear.
We want to remember
our dead, make an altar,
bring our daughter
to the photograph trace a chin
here, for good luck, palm
her grandmother’s hair,
she doesn’t know
who she is yet
Farid says he wants to be a family,
he adds, by which I mean I don’t want you to die.
How did the fall begin? With touch? With naming? You were guidebook, misstep. You were hiking in Japan.
I do not mean to lose the coast. But the fragrant wood of the skiff, shore whining with current, as though I could hear the coil of electric lines humming with speech, the slur of ordering—and in overhearing seek to follow, or move away from, bow knifing the water and splaying it from its back, sound retreating fathoms down from the oar’s dip and dip.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.