By U. S. DHUGA
No compunction, my physiotherapist
Exits, kale juice in hand, the Raw Chemist
With the swagger of a Neoptolemus
Who will lie to me, to you, to all of us
For the sake of winning what he mythifies
As our battle.
I found the Cyclops and his Galatea
in their shop on Piano Provenanza.
They’d been domestic for a while.
I’d gone for his wildflowers and Ragabo pines.
I’d gone for the wintry July breezes that
dilute the sulfur of his neighborhood.
I’d gone to see the roughened lava of
his searching, the obsidian of his instant grief.
I thought you were dead.
On your Facebook wall,
well-wishes and then nothing.
The mitosis of what if:
worries twirl and spiral
and settle into clock-cogs
which lock and jam.
My friend with the brain tumor—a grisly glioma
Surgeons can’t get to the bottom of—that on one side
Of his head presses transmitters on the other, hears
A constant, streaming waterwheel of voices and music,
Slopping pails drawn up from who knows where
Each of us has reservoired it all—the dreamhorde,
The broadcasts, bunny hops, back seat schmoozing,
Nixon’s re-election bid, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,”
Cheap café tunes with dummy lyrics, traffic reports,
By TIMOTHY LIU
Her hands kept on
working their way
into my pants even
after the wedding
toast—the evening
merely an excuse
By VALERIE DUFF
Iron mallet, shield of glass. Our
genesis a crucible of gas
and condensation shot straight through the aorta
The forecast was wrong.
The bald guy smiling
but wrong. The blonde
with swinging hair
wrong. Their software,
their reading of currents. Rain,
they said, rain for days.
By NORMAN LOCK
Fluent in the languages of unnatural death, Luis Boscán set down on thick paper the confessions of the Spanish damned while, outside the cruel chamber furnished ingeniously with instruments of torment, the fountains of Seville produced liquid acanthus leaves to the sound of castanets.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.