All posts tagged: October

Podcast: Christopher Spaide on “Closure?”

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Transcript: Christopher Spaide Podcast

Christopher Spaide speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “Closure?,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Chris talks about how his curiosity for language and wordplay often lead him into deeper themes in his poems. He also discusses taking his first poetry class at Amherst College, and, now, teaching poetry classes himself at Emory University.

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Podcast: Christopher Spaide on “Closure?”
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October 2023 Poetry Feature

New poems by our contributors BRAD CRENSHAW, JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER, ELIZABETH HODGES and OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK

Table of Contents:

  • Oksana Maksymchuk, “Sentences”
  • Joanne Dominique Dwyer, “Prophesies in a Park”
  • Elizabeth Hodges, “Athena”
  • Brad Crenshaw, “Spilling Seed (Second Vision)”

 

                                     Sentences
                                     By Oksana Maksymchuk

                                     A ten-year-old, escaped
                                     from a war waged across 
                                     a membranous border

October 2023 Poetry Feature
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Klan Giant

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

 

“Made of Duretta cloth and sateen, embroidered in silk.
Cotton cord and tassels. Price, each $6.00″
—from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Look up here, the air is Aryan. The moon, 
our white hood. Our life must loom large 
above that which is darkened in our shadow.
A fate loomed long ago, ours

Klan Giant
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The Desire Tree

By MEERA NAIR

By the time the car stops at the end of the dirt road, we’ve been jolting along for an hour. Before us is the banyan tree we have come to see—its giant trunk surrounded by hanging roots, its distant crown shutting out the sky.

It is summer in Kerala, and the world is liquid and shimmery with heat. The roads and fields are parched, waiting, suspended in a burning delirium for the moment the monsoon will break. My aunt Sudha and I have just driven through miles of sun-blasted paddy fields, but the abrupt immensity of the tree makes the light feel shadowed, as if dusk has fallen at noon. A hushed feeling comes over me as the dark, looming presence asserts itself.

The Desire Tree
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Perfect Storms

By ALEXANDRA TEAGUE

 

The Jungle Cruise

My mother and I are on a chlorinated river that’s somehow simultaneously the Amazon, Congo, and Nile, floating languidly so we don’t run into the boat in front of us and “don’t scare the wildlife”: the kind of joke the Disney guide, in his safari hat and over-pocketed explorer outfit, keeps making.

Perfect Storms
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Operation Avalanche

By ROSSELLA MILONE

Translated from the Italian by LAURA MASINI and LINDA WORRELL 

“I am living permanently in my dream, 
from which I make brief forays into reality.”

—Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

 

  1.  

Erminia danced the Charleston. My friend Gianluca told me how, almost every evening, his grandmother would pause on the threshold of the French doors that opened onto the terrace and trace out the steps. Her arms swinging, legs twisting, a toe to the front, then to the back, a heel swiveling to the side, a toe to the front again. She confined her movements to the doorway as though she wanted to go unnoticed, and yet somehow she demanded the attention of anyone nearby. Whenever I was at Gianluca’s, I always saw her singing softly to herself.

Operation Avalanche
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