Poetry | Page 2 | The Common

Heel

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

I was jump-starting the car, having asked a stranger to hook up their car to mine. I was worried about her biopsy. Then I was talking to him about his new jacket, his awful landlord, his blinding headaches. He told me about left-isolate construction in sentences. I was writing, the work of it like a pilgrim’s progress conducted on one’s knees. Because the nights were so hot, I was unable to sleep. I was laughing because he insisted on building his own bookcases, painting them cantaloupe-orange. I was helping her clear out the backyard of junk. I was with her by the river. I was thinking of him, the taste of smoke on his lips. In the dusk, he showed me the lighthouse. I was often wondering where he was, day after day, the baseball cap that had to be taken off him to lean into his face. I was listening to the small dogs barking and making noise like small kids. I myself was being brought to heel.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Someone Else’s House

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By EMILY LEITHAUSER

When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,

body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;

shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned

Holding the World’s Coat

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DANIEL MOYSAENKO

I do not like what you’ve done to yourself—

predictable theatre of struggle
I’m in the wings
of
world

Instead take this
translucent
pisces-glyph bug:

           Its antennae flitting to test
           the space just in front of its face
           It struts right into a recluse web

A lesson in what distracts from pain:

Say pinching my wrist
while a fish hook’s mined from my foot

leaving an open-pit bull’s-eye
that never heals closed

What distracts from another’s:

A brick wall collapses
and takes down another in pixels

Names next to “laborer” and “child” replaced
by 2S4 Tyulpan heavy mortar

Now the poplared river
that Tatars were bussed over
is redrawn by kamikaze drones

And below
a wine cave in Crimea has its bottles
scooped out

Melon-ball divots
and cobwebs left—

this basilica of dust I watch the vintner pray in

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Chicago Review. Recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Emory University Rose Library Fellowship, he lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.

Chasing the Light

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By KEVIN O’CONNOR

When taking a visual field test
to map the areas you cannot see,
you need to keep your gaze fixed
on the screen’s central point
so when lights flash on the periphery
your eye will not just anticipate
and follow the quick programmed glints
you click on like someone playing
a video game—“chasing the light”
in order to get a higher score,
instead of learning where
the blind spots in your vision are.

Half-blind in one eye
and riddled with dead-zones
in the other, you see now
that you have spent most of your life
searching each human encounter
for random flashes of romance,
never admitting the limits
of your vision—the need to keep your gaze
fixed on the person at the center,
to remain patient, waiting in the dark,
for the horizon to light up
as if suddenly before you.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Kevin O’Connor is an editor of One on a Side: An Evening with Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost, and his poems and reviews have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review Online, James Joyce Quarterly, and other publications. He is faculty emeritus at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

To All the White Boys Who Love Me When I’m Manic

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By ERICA DAWSON

and hypersexual and drunk and, how
should I say, easy, when we share a kiss

Hawk

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By RICK BAROT

In the park we stopped and looked up at the high branch where the ferruginous hawk ate another winged thing, the torn feathers drifting down. The hawk made a noise, like a little lever of pleasure giving way inside. I thought of the question the choreographer asked her gathered dancers: What do you do in order to be loved? It was as though I’d been holding my breath the whole day, walking beside you. A strong spring light struck us. Next to you on the ground, your shadow looked like crumpled black paper.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Negative Capability

May 5, 2025 Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability”
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey

The Wild Geese

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By MORRI CREECH

Where were the wild geese going, slurred across
the yellow sky in mid-December light,
fading into some everglade of memory?
I saw them slip like notions over the pines
in simple distances beyond the winter
as the wind laid the river grasses down,
saw how the strict formations left no trace.

Pie

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By RICK BAROT

I took a class on how to make pie. When one desires tender fruit, a structured crust, gold at the edges, there is no ease. The teacher wore a black apron, serious as the stone inside the fruit. We stood around an industrial table, each with a bowl. Flour, yolk, shortening, sugar. Outside was summer. The oven hummed. What was called for was a teaspoon of salt. Now remove a pinch for the ocean beyond the window, its humid air. Now remove a pinch for what sweats from the fingers in the long kneading. You are always hungry. I’m your blue ribbon. I’m your huckleberry.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.