Issue 7 | Page 2 | The Common

When an Old Classmate Learns I Am a Lesbian

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Poetry

“Oh my God! I knew it! I always knew it. I was like Julie is so gay, & people were like oh, whatever, you just think everybody’s gay because it’s an all-girls school, but I knew I wasn’t gay, & I knew most of those girls weren’t gay, so I was like fuck you, Jasmine, go suck on one of your Jolly Rancher rings! Do you remember those?

When I Was Straight

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JULIE MARIE WADE

I did not love men as I do now.

I loved them wincing & wanting to please.

I loved them trying too hard.

MR.

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Poetry

By NICHOLAS YB WONG

He taught me about empires, got spotted

in a ferry leaning almost too close to a man

in the same tee.

The City

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By BRUCE BOND

Let us say you are. You are the girl

who, looking out her window to the city,

takes on the grey pallor of the day,

the way some lizards take on the green

shade of the season they are in, so close

to the garden the garden cannot find them.

Henri Province in Wessex

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JOSEPH HARRISON

Now, when the thatch-roofed cottages

Send up their puffs and curls

From heating folk and pottages,

And steadily thickening swirls

Fugue: Two Painters

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Poetry

By: JADYN DEWALD

“The garden is here in the middle of your bedroom,” she tells him, unbuttoning her mandarin orange blouse, then giving up and raising her arms in the manner of (he thinks) the Spaniard before Napoleon’s firing squad. He steps toward her and lifts the blouse over her head.

Dissolution (Or, Landscape With Martyr)

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Poetry

By JAYDN DEWALD

Afterward, he watched her lumber out of the coliseum

Swinging the severed head of his panther—

All that talk about Madrid and his old Segovia albums

And look what good it did them.

They Had Had It In Mind

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By CAROLINE KNOX

They had had it in mind to adopt a retired whippet,

which would have been easy for a retired ballet

dancer, if she had been one, and easy on the wallet

for him, an actuary. But she was a pellet-

and-woodstove saleswoman. They looked at a basset.

The Coondle Elegies

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Poetry

By JOHN KINSELLA

Bobtail skin—fat and flexibly crisp—shucked

in a roll of fencing wire in the red shed: not dead

the bearer of dead skin, expanded even.

Erasure

April 1, 2014 Issue 07, Issue 07 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LIVEWELL

High up on fire escapes the schoolgirls clapped
erasers, chalk dust floating in a cloud,
the words and numbers scripted by the nuns
freed to autumnal treetops.

All posts tagged: Issue 7

When an Old Classmate Learns I Am a Lesbian

When I Was Straight

MR.

The City

Henri Province in Wessex

Fugue: Two Painters

Dissolution (Or, Landscape With Martyr)

They Had Had It In Mind

The Coondle Elegies

Erasure

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