I
Wondrous, the emptiness so close, close to an absent sea,
only sea-fields, wheat-fields, golden stubble,
though we were walking together on a path to find the sea.
Wandering together under a wide horizon.
On a road called Pas de l’Assassin.
2025 was a momentous year for The Common: our fifteenth anniversary, our 30th issue, even a major motion picture based on a story in the magazine. We’re more grateful than ever for our readers, contributors, donors, and friends.
Before we close out this busy year of publishing, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the unique, resonant, and transporting pieces that made 2025 memorable. The Common published 269 contributors this year. Below, you can browse a list of the ten most-read new pieces of 2025 to get a taste of what left an impact on readers.
*
Candy and Layer Cake: Zack Strait in Conversation with Richard Siken (and Five Poems)
“The whole world seemed like a five-paragraph essay but poetry rubbed against that. It was contrary and rebellious. That summer it rained a lot, and hard. We had a 100-year flood. It washed out bridges. I saw a house on the edge of a swollen wash lose its backyard and then get swept away. I didn’t want to talk about it, I wanted to make somebody feel it. I started writing every day. I was very bad at it. ”
—Richard Siken
New Work from LAUREN DELAPENHA, AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, ROBERT CORDING, and RACHEL HADAS
Table of Contents:
—Lauren Delapenha, “Exodus”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “What They Didn’t Tell Me about Motherhood”
—Robert Cording, “A Sun”
—Rachel Hadas, “Matsinger Forest”
Exodus
By Lauren Delapenha
The Times article is about the president’s mind
and Xerox-based enterprises like Kodak, Blockbuster, dead-end jobs, and marriages,
and I am so glad the article mentions marriages
given my recent apophatic commitment to romantic
ruination, because who among us hasn’t pressed a finger into the scab
for that foreign roughness, that delicious, needling shaft of sunk cost and thought
that anything is probable in the desert,
even Moses neatly halving an ocean for a nation
By ALAA ALQAISI
Gaza, Palestine
We stepped out with our eyes uncovered.
Gaza kept looking through them—
green tanks asleep on roofs, a stubborn gull,
water heavy with scales at dawn.
Nothing in us chose the hinges to slacken.
The latch turned without our hands.
Papers practiced the border’s breath.
On the bus, the glass held us—
a pond that would not name who stays.
New work from RODRIGO TOSCANO, OLENA JENNINGS, EZZA AHMED, and WYATT TOWNLEY
Table of Contents:
—Rodrigo Toscano, “One Like”
—Olena Jennings, “The Pine”
—Ezza Ahmed, “The River That Was and Wasn’t”
—Wyatt Townley, “The Longest View” and “Christina’s World”
One Like
By Rodrigo Toscano
“Couple Bach preludes, a binding ceasefire,
One Dickenson poem, and we’re all set”
That was the post, like a gleaming beach pier
Charming half way out, torn up at the tip
Battered by statecraft, departmental verse.
By JULIA TOLO
Søgne, Norway, July 8, 2018
Sitting around the white painted wood and metal table
that hosted the best dinners of my childhood
my uncle is sharing
his many theories of the world
the complexities of his thoughts are
reserved for Norwegian, with some words here and there
to keep his English-speaking audience engaged
I don’t translate, don’t want to
repeat those thoughts
in any language
but we have a nice time
there’s a cheesecake with macerated peaches
and mint
the sun is low and through the window to my grandma’s house
the heavy lace curtains are catching the light
This month we bring you work by Dylan Carpenter, a poet new to our pages. Dylan also has poetry in an upcoming print issue of The Common.
Let me, for a little longer, ponder that familiar place
I remember but would not, could not, and had refused to face
Wholly as a place unto itself, instead of an idea
That concealed a recherché emotion: My Wallonia.
How do I begin? The place that I endeavor to portray
Languishes, a somnolent geography, and slips away.
Ontologies
The love the love that massively seizes me,
the typewriter’s
ribbon needs replacing,
the great imperial
power game the price of oil,
a call, a response, I know you know
how precious to care is, the voice on the record on
the turntable is singing.
Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,
the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,
the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually
living it. This time around, let the only fireworks
Not the girl
after the party
waiting for boy wonder
Not the couple
after the test
awaiting word
Not the actor
after the callback
for the job that changes everything
Not the mother
on the floor
whose son has gone missing
I am the beloved
and you are the beloved
We’re all beside ourselves
as the phone is beside ourselves
One hand grips the menu
the other covers the eyes
Now the phone rings
it is singing on the table
To the dog across the room
to the waitress who is waiting
To the cat on the carpet
to the couple in the next booth
But the heart is in the cupboard
breaking the dishes
Wyatt Townley is poet laureate emerita of Kansas and has published six books. Her work has been read on NPR and has appeared in journals from Newsweek to The Paris Review, and Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Commissioned poems hang in libraries including the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of the Hubble.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.