Issue 29 | The Common

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

May 28, 2025 Audio, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

LUCAS SCHAEFER speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about his story “Tuesday,” which appears in The Common’s brand new spring issue. “Tuesday” is an excerpt from his novel The Slip, out June 3 from Simon & Schuster; both center on a motley cast of characters at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Lucas talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the novel as a whole, which started over a decade ago as a series of linked short stories. Lucas also discusses how the novel’s central mystery came together, what it was like writing with humor and in so many voices, and how his own experience at an Austin boxing gym inspired the story and its characters.

Raffia Memory

May 5, 2025 Audio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays

By LILY LLOYD BURKHALTER

The Common Magazine · "Raffia Memory" by Lily Lloyd Burkhalter

The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.

Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.

Ode to Mitski

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By WILLIAM FARGASON

while driving today     to pick up groceries
I drive over     the bridge where it would be
so easy to drive     right off     the water
a blanket to lay over     my head     its fevers

The Elephant’s Child

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By PRIA ANAND

The elephant-headed boy was born with the head of a boy.

“I had been expecting you for years,” his mother told him. “By the time you were born, you could practically walk.”

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs.

The Month When I Watch Joker Every Day

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By ERICA DAWSON

The month is February and that means
nothing because winter in Tampa is
the same as fall and spring so it could’ve
been easily Thoreau’s “September sun”
or Eliot’s “April is” blah blah blah.

Target Island

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By MARIAH RIGG

Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.

Wandering

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By ALA JANBEK
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

Amman was culture, colorful walls, and distant souqs in the old city where Mama tried to buy everything we needed in one trip. Na’ur was where my grandfather built the mill near a spring, where our home by the hill watches the sun set behind Palestine, far from the chaos of the valley.

Kaymoor, West Virginia

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By G. C. WALDREP

According to rule. The terrible safeguard
of the text when placed against the granite
ledge into which our industry inscribed
itself. We were prying choice from the jaws
of poverty, from the laws of poverty.

Curlew Sixth Sense Bantry

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By JOHN KINSELLA

To take a liberty with lexicon
is remiss in the circumstances
of the curlew
with diminished habitat.
It reprises every day,
and the mudflats
sheeted by the in-
sweep of tide leads it to the mowed
grass in front of the Bantry

All posts tagged: Issue 29

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

Raffia Memory

Ode to Mitski

The Elephant’s Child

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place

The Month When I Watch Joker Every Day

Target Island

Wandering

Kaymoor, West Virginia

Curlew Sixth Sense Bantry

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