Issue 22 | Page 2 | The Common

Past and Future on Rapa Nui

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays, Studio

The morning was clear and the colors vivid: yellow brush, white ocean froth against cobalt sky. In front of me, dense gray volcanic stone appeared to consume the light. I stood in salty mist before an altar on the north coast of Rapa Nui, Easter Island. A single toppled moai lay in violent chunks on the ground. At 9:00 a.m. the sun still hovered tight at the horizon. Rapa Nui, which is part of Chile 2,300 miles away, is kept closer to mainland time than by geographical rights it should be. The sun rises gray and sticky at 8:30 in the morning, and sets late, too. This is not the only disorienting thing about Rapa Nui, but rather the most objective example.

Sometimes All You Can Do Is Wait

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ZEINA HASHEM BECK

The dermatologist injects the local anesthetic
into my upper arm. When she begins to carve,

Safety Advice for Staying Indoors

October 25, 2021 Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By MARY O’DONOGHUE

The farmer’s daughter began her fifth period, more excavating, more mortal than the previous. The toilet under the stairs flushed half-heartedly, returning red-brown effluent. Go down, go away, be off to the underworld! She pumped a second time, jangled the handle to make her point. But there would be more. Dark clumps and entrails, another six days of the end of the world.

Tupac of Mamourah, 1999

October 25, 2021 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By ANNA ZACHARIAS

Tupac Shakur was in Ras Al Khaimah, said Sami.

“But Tupac is dead,” said Connor.

“Astaghfirullah,” said Mayed.

“Tupac’s not dead,” said Sami. “He’s at the sheikh’s palace.” Sami had heard from his friend Nadia, whose uncle arranged security for the sheikh, that Tupac Shakur, the king of hip-hop, Mr. Thug Life himself, was on Jebel Jais.

Dey

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

Winner of the 2021 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By STEPHANIE DINSAE

The Common Magazine · “Dey” by Stephanie Dinsae

The pidgin form of ‘to be’¹

A young child, I was privy to hearing this word
in my household, around my uncle and his friends
reminiscent of his schoolboy youth.
A part of a pidgin I could never participate in
for fear that the broken English might
have too much of an essence, might
tarnish my own English.
They would not let me code switch
thinking the pidgin would overtake me

Disorder

October 25, 2021 Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By FARAH ALI

Early one morning, when the sky was still dark, Annie locked herself in her room. She turned the key three times, then went to her bed and opened a book.

II.

At half past seven, her mother knocked on her door and told her to get up. When Annie didn’t appear, her mother tried the handle and found the room locked. Half an hour later, she put her ear to the door and heard nothing, not even the loud whisper of the ceiling fan. A strange feeling got hold of her; she knocked and spoke more sharply. “Open!” She slapped the wood with the palm of her hand and began to shout for her husband. “Come quickly! Annie’s not coming out—something has happened to her!”

Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays

By NOOR NAGA

I have dreamt of this Arabian Gulf Portfolio ever since I was a teenager, writing about snow and squirrels and picket fences—despite living in Dubai where I had more experience with temperatures of 40+ degrees, karak chai, compounds… Because English was my first language, the fiction that was available and accessible to me at the time was perpetually happening elsewhere. My high school education focused on the British and American canons, meaning that we had no exposure to global Anglophone literature, let alone any works set in the United Arab Emirates. The bookshops sold mainly self-help and cookbooks in the 2000s. The public libraries were few, poorly stocked, and dominated by Arabic literature that was also generally quite dated. Consequently, for most of my teenage years, my imagination was furnished by foreign clutter and peopled by strangers I had no knowledge of first-hand. There was the book-world and there was the real-world, and I didn’t even appreciate how separate they were in my mind until I began to write about rivers and forests and realized there were none around me. The mimetic dimension of literature had been severed entirely.

Castro Street

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By PHILLIP WATTS BROWN

The Common Magazine · Castro Street

As through a prism, the city shifts
to rainbow. We cross into technicolor,

Oman Is Mars: An Alien All Along

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays

By PRIYANKA SACHETI

“We want to simulate Mars on Earth and so we need a place that looks as much like Mars as possible. And we found it here in Oman.”
—Alexander Soucek, lead flight director of the AMADEE-18 mission, in Phys Org, October 30, 2017

The first time my husband visited me in Oman years ago, he peered down from the plane window and received his first glimpse of the landscape: an undulating palette of browns, beige, mauve, and grays. This is Mars, he thought to himself. Mars on Earth.

Dispellations: Manomaya Kosha

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ANNA MARIA HONG

You can’t defeat nature, you can only
work with it. Just as speculating
on a perpetrator’s motives —sex as
power, power as hard exercise
of a phantom sense
of impotence,
blah, blah, blah—is trackless, so too is
asking what does it want, it wants
far less than you or I could
ever envision
in our least released
lives. It means no harm.
It needs a warm
host. We invoke genre to accommodate
events terrible and intimate,
to give fleshly narrative to cataclysms
of globular dimension— private/public, macro/micro
—samskara, samskara, these fictions sizzling through
the World Wide Gap,
racist, replicant, and species-specific.

All posts tagged: Issue 22

Past and Future on Rapa Nui

Sometimes All You Can Do Is Wait

Safety Advice for Staying Indoors

Tupac of Mamourah, 1999

Dey

Disorder

Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?

Castro Street

Oman Is Mars: An Alien All Along

Dispellations: Manomaya Kosha

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