May 2025 | Page 3 | The Common

Heel

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

I was jump-starting the car, having asked a stranger to hook up their car to mine. I was worried about her biopsy. Then I was talking to him about his new jacket, his awful landlord, his blinding headaches. He told me about left-isolate construction in sentences. I was writing, the work of it like a pilgrim’s progress conducted on one’s knees. Because the nights were so hot, I was unable to sleep. I was laughing because he insisted on building his own bookcases, painting them cantaloupe-orange. I was helping her clear out the backyard of junk. I was with her by the river. I was thinking of him, the taste of smoke on his lips. In the dusk, he showed me the lighthouse. I was often wondering where he was, day after day, the baseball cap that had to be taken off him to lean into his face. I was listening to the small dogs barking and making noise like small kids. I myself was being brought to heel.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Someone Else’s House

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

By EMILY LEITHAUSER

When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,

body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;

shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned

Holding the World’s Coat

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

By DANIEL MOYSAENKO

I do not like what you’ve done to yourself—

predictable theatre of struggle
I’m in the wings
of
world

Instead take this
translucent
pisces-glyph bug:

           Its antennae flitting to test
           the space just in front of its face
           It struts right into a recluse web

A lesson in what distracts from pain:

Say pinching my wrist
while a fish hook’s mined from my foot

leaving an open-pit bull’s-eye
that never heals closed

What distracts from another’s:

A brick wall collapses
and takes down another in pixels

Names next to “laborer” and “child” replaced
by 2S4 Tyulpan heavy mortar

Now the poplared river
that Tatars were bussed over
is redrawn by kamikaze drones

And below
a wine cave in Crimea has its bottles
scooped out

Melon-ball divots
and cobwebs left—

this basilica of dust I watch the vintner pray in

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Chicago Review. Recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Emory University Rose Library Fellowship, he lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.

Sufi Trance

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Issue 29, Translation

By MARYAM DAJANI
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

I’m leaving Abdoun after having sushi at Noodasia, heading toward Airport Road. The traffic light in front of me turns red, and all I have to do is step on the brakes… but where are the brakes? Are they on the right, or is that the gas? I’m getting closer to the light, cars are stacking up in front of me, what do I do? Is the pedal on the right or left?!

I wake up.

My car: a room of my own with glass walls open to the world. One that makes me feel free and independent, when, in truth, I’m public property.

Driving isn’t my time for reflection anymore. Ever since I started using GPS for everything—even finding the shortest route to places I know well—I’ve gotten too busy trying to shave a minute or two off the drive to think. Too busy following the blue line.

Chasing the Light

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

By KEVIN O’CONNOR

When taking a visual field test
to map the areas you cannot see,
you need to keep your gaze fixed
on the screen’s central point
so when lights flash on the periphery
your eye will not just anticipate
and follow the quick programmed glints
you click on like someone playing
a video game—“chasing the light”
in order to get a higher score,
instead of learning where
the blind spots in your vision are.

Half-blind in one eye
and riddled with dead-zones
in the other, you see now
that you have spent most of your life
searching each human encounter
for random flashes of romance,
never admitting the limits
of your vision—the need to keep your gaze
fixed on the person at the center,
to remain patient, waiting in the dark,
for the horizon to light up
as if suddenly before you.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Kevin O’Connor is an editor of One on a Side: An Evening with Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost, and his poems and reviews have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review Online, James Joyce Quarterly, and other publications. He is faculty emeritus at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

To All the White Boys Who Love Me When I’m Manic

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

By ERICA DAWSON

and hypersexual and drunk and, how
should I say, easy, when we share a kiss

Serious Attempts at Locating the City

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Issue 29, Translation

By HALEEMAH DERBASHI

Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM

When Did Life Flip Upside Down and Make Us Walk on the Ceiling?

I asked him, “Where are we?”

He said the name, then became preoccupied with finding batteries for his portable radio with one hand, and with the other clutching me so that the crowds would not sweep me away.

“What does that mean?” I pressed.

Hawk

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

By RICK BAROT

In the park we stopped and looked up at the high branch where the ferruginous hawk ate another winged thing, the torn feathers drifting down. The hawk made a noise, like a little lever of pleasure giving way inside. I thought of the question the choreographer asked her gathered dancers: What do you do in order to be loved? It was as though I’d been holding my breath the whole day, walking beside you. A strong spring light struck us. Next to you on the ground, your shadow looked like crumpled black paper.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Negative Capability

May 5, 2025 Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability”
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey

Tuesday

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

By LUCAS SCHAEFER

The morning after Ed Hooley saw a coyote in the supply closet, Bob Alexander declared something smelled rotten inside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.

This was at six a.m. on a Tuesday, midway through abs and stretching. Inside the ring, the eleven members of the First Thing crew sprawled out on foam mats as Terry Tucker, fifty-four, led them through an arduous medley of scissor kicks and side-to-sides, knees-to-your-ears and upside-down bicycle. It was August in Austin, the average age inside the ring was forty-nine, and though it would be hours before a single speck of perspiration would appear on Terry’s left temple, his charges were sopping.

All posts tagged: May 2025

Heel

Someone Else’s House

Holding the World’s Coat

Sufi Trance

Chasing the Light

To All the White Boys Who Love Me When I’m Manic

Serious Attempts at Locating the City

Hawk

Negative Capability

Tuesday

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