The rain had just finished saying, This block is mine.
The kind of rain where you could sleep through two breakthroughs and still have enough left to belly sing in the ambrosial hour.
Blood pellets in the dusk & dashes of hail were perfect for finding new stashes; that is to say, visitations were never announced.
A broken umbrella handle posed a question by the day care center.
In conversation with A Hill in the South Bronx, by Perla de Leon
Estoy buscando un árbol que me de sombra
Porque el que tengo me lo van a cortar
Coro de bomba
This building stands,
the last tree to be cut down
in a garden of brick and steel
made desert of rubble and dust.
21 de septiembre de 2017: “pero estamos vivos”
One: home
Two: home dos tres dos tres two: Mother.
One lápiz. One pen. One ocean between us. Six: Home.
Josey picks me up at work in a car we bought
together, car she dug out of frozen slush for hours.
She picks me up and gives me roses. Valentine’s Day.
In that year of a shot to the head where were you the first time you broke night?
When you break night, you learn that one puff, under the right circumstance, can give you the right perspective.
You learn to pick up stories that fall & slip on the right side of knowing.
un/bodying/s
Poetry by TODD HEARON
Music by GREGORY W. BROWN
“I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true”
Geoffrey Hill, i.m., 1932 – 2016
1. The Meeting of the Waters
Sempiternal waters, sing-
ly sing, gush glottal-less & all
onomatopoetical your
triphthong’s liquid pluraling
through rock & ruck & rill
By MATT SALYER
Check me on fleek like the night
kitchen mothers, pucker and hum some; come,
I like to liquor louche; let’s watch the flock
of spring-heeled bound as borough cabs
exhaust their carbon phantoms like a gauche
of fuck. Do you unzoo, unrouge
to rat as white, what roughshod? Do.
I want the carnal as straight metacognition,
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.)
By ZACK STRAIT
There is a dark blue bible in the nightstand, a pitcher and torch
stamped on the cover in gold. I rub this symbol
with my thumb and I am comforted, knowing another
man was in this room before me, just to
place his light here.
By VALERIE DUFF
Iron mallet, shield of glass. Our
genesis a crucible of gas
and condensation shot straight through the aorta
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