At The Common we’re welcoming spring with new poetry by our contributors. (Be sure to listen to the audio link to Megan Fernandes’ “White People Always Want to Tell Me…,” read by the author.)
Once in a car, a good boy
shook me hard. If you like it
that way in bed, then why are you…
the tiny bruises on my arms
where his prints pressed into my pink
sleeves rose to the surface like rattles.
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.
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Celebrating 15 Years