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November 2020 Poetry Feature: David Lehman

November 27, 2020 Poetry

We are happy to welcome DAVID LEHMAN back to our pages.

The Complete History of the Boy

1.
The baby giggled in his crib.
His father walked in. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because,” the baby said, “we all have our joy.”
It was his first sentence.

When the baby had his own bed,
he said children are luckier than grownups
because they get to sleep in their own bed
while grownups have to share.

At four he was asked what he wanted
to be when he grew up. “Santa Claus,” he said.

That was Thanksgiving. By January he thought better of it.
“I never want to be a grown-up because
that would be the end of me.”

It was the age of the aphorism:
“Candles are statues that burn for the ceremony.”
“Saliva is the maid of your mouth.” (It cleanses it.)

July on South St. (AEAE)

November 18, 2020 Dispatches

By NICK MAIONE

Northampton, MA

I open the doors and windows and shut off the lights.
For a while I play tunes on the fiddle
shirtless in my dark house. I love doing this.
For the first time all day I am not at home.
For the first time since the last time
my body is the same size as my flesh.
The only home I have is finally mine
and there is a breeze.

Goddamn

July 15, 2020 Dispatches, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER

Music by ABRAHAM KATZ

The Common Magazine · Goddamn

Northern Israel-Palestine

The chunk of the ball
On the cracked blacktop
And our torsos so covered
In sweat nearby the sea
Swells and the smell seeps
Into our hair and the air

Claudia Masin: Spanish Poetry in Translation

June 22, 2020 Poetry, Translation

Poems by CLAUDIA MASIN
Translated from the Spanish by ROBIN MYERS

Poems appear in both Spanish and English

Translator’s Note

When I translate Claudia Masin, I feel like I’m ice skating. This is not a foolproof metaphor, I know. But what I mean, mostly, is that it’s exhilarating. Her long, deft, elegant lines; her line breaks, both graceful and unpredictable; her limber back-and-forth between the broadly rhetorical and the minutely descriptive: all of this, all of her language, structure, and sense of timing, forms a surface, a gleaming expanse that I feel free—I want to feel free—to glide across. Fast enough for a sense of wonder, the illusion of ease; not so fast that I don’t notice what’s around me. Or beneath me: the inherent spookiness of ice, the shadows under the surface, the plants and creatures stilled but still living where we can sense more than see them.

ruckus

June 17, 2020 Dispatches, Poetry

By VAUGHN M. WATSON

The United States

a rotor spins in concentric circles
the epicenter a DC street at dusk
even a military helicopter’s incessant droning
can’t wake this country to its circumstance

Love, Under a Falling Sky

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By MEGAN PINTO

The Common Magazine · “Love, Under A Falling Sky” by Megan Pinto

Say Chicken Little was right, that the sky
is falling. What I want to know is,
will the moon fall too? Will it bounce softly
like swiss cheese, or will it crumble
like a stale cookie? Do skies bruise?
Do they ache? And is the sky
a metaphor for all the ills and evils
of the world? A testament
to how the earth can only hold so much
pain and grief? But why
would God send a chicken? Would you listen
to a chicken? Is the chicken a metaphor
for Jesus? Did the Bible mention this
and somehow I missed it? Is this because
in 6th grade my teacher made me promise Jesus
my virginity in a gift basket? Actually, if the sky falls,

Modern Gods

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JOHN FREEMAN

The Common Magazine · “Modern Gods” by John Freeman

Backlit by the glow
from a small passageway,
he kneels into the fog
of yellow light,
head kissing the carpet.
I step around him,
respecting his privacy, when
the mat becomes not prayer
rug but builder’s tool,
a black piece of tarmac, laid down
before the bank so he could
peer close, fix the dead
motion sensor so that people
with money could
be seen, all doors opening
for them.

Nocturne

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Poetry

By RICARDO PAU-LLOSA

Blue, the infinite within a boundary hue.
Edo artists relished its blood-drain
of sea dawns. Westerners learned to brew
from the Virgin’s mantle the brim celestial stain.

Autopsy

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Poetry

By JANUARY GILL O’NEIL

I have read the report—inconclusive.
Yet, I know how much your brain weighs,

your liver, your heart. Your ordinary,
damaged heart. I know it by the gram.

Letter from American Airspace

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Poetry

By ELIZABETH A. I. POWELL

The end of romance was what the teenage girl
was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin
in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I.,
but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven.
She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be
nostalgic? You listened, like your poems do when you write
them down in the cafes of Kerouac’s time here. You are Angelico
Americano with Instagram—troubled children of your own back home.

All posts tagged: Poem

November 2020 Poetry Feature: David Lehman

July on South St. (AEAE)

Goddamn

Claudia Masin: Spanish Poetry in Translation

ruckus

Love, Under a Falling Sky

Modern Gods

Nocturne

Autopsy

Letter from American Airspace

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