Stare…
—Walker Evans’ advice to young artists
So here’s a board-and-batten house—
a wall of planks with ragged ends
behind the windows’ splitting sills—
New Work for the New Year
This month we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn to our pages, presenting poems included in her first book, Four Weathercocks, which will be published by Marick Press in March. We’re also happy to be welcoming back TC contributors David Lehman, Jonathan Moody, and Sylvie Durbec. Lehman’s new book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Jonathan Moody won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize for his collection Olympic Butter Gold, published in November 2015. The book includes five poems first published in The Common. Jean Follain Prize-winner Sylvie Durbec’s poem “Shining Red in the Torrent” is offered here in its entirety, translated by Denis Hirson. An excerpt from the poem was published in The Common Issue 10.
| All of this was farmland once. When they came to build the incinerator, my father dressed like a masked outlaw. His friends carried six-foot pencils. |
I took a drive out to The Gallimaufry Goat Farm and was
struck by the vast assortment of goat life in one place.
Goats who’d go shock-still when startled, like a bolt
through the head, fall stiff as taxidermy to the ground.
By BRUCE BOND
After Terrence Malick
When the dinosaur, at the dawn of mercy,
lifts his hoof from the throat of his rival
whose pulse you see, whose eye tells you seas
have parted into the ken of separate selves—
That black telephone would ring and ring,
fixed to its wall. It was a ring that roamed
the mind, while night drummed down
its list of last and lost events, circadian
paths that tangled where they tried to pass,
crossed and uncrossed hours.
Dear little day later,
Can’t you keep up?
There is no going back
so don’t insist. The view’s bound
by the block, fenced for now
but then will come
and new alarms
will set off and stop.
By GARY METRAS
A cloud drifting over the house tonight
is the shape of an insect, a hellgrammite,
large, long, and singular, crawling through
the waters of dark sky.
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