By RU FREEMAN
Eudora writes to William about roses
Mr. Hennessey’s Gloire Dijon
Beauty of Glazenwood found
on the sides of barns its yellow
flaked with red caught only
from the windows of passing trains
they didn’t find us beautiful. The haters
let our skin slip, slowly, from our bones,
satiated our thirst with sludge and brine water,
led us to wrathful prayers offered in caves.
I’ve learned that a small amount of painkill
blooms into a heartbreak, just as the moon
sinks in the ocean, smears and dissolves,
depleted by the longest of hopeful nights.
The sign painted on the truck is a phrase
I contemplate under a vine-covered pergola.
You might call this walled city garden
my hermitage—the faint notes
of a live flute from an open window
harmonizing with a robin’s song.
Sirens break my reverie.
To win you back, I wrote in vain
Of a place only the two of us know.
Where snow when it snowed wasn’t snow.
Where rain when it rained wasn’t rain.
That was the world.
That was the place
Where we lived—
![[No one can take my anger]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1419132290_c90a4c34e3_b.jpg)
not even you who caused it.
& no one can take my madness
not even my honied friends
who try to pull me back from
the edge of myself, who update
each other in the groupchat
of how my body is wasting
for Ange Mlinko
Of C. H. Krumm—Charles Harrison, or Harry—
a single trace remains on Catalina,
so oxidized, so salt-worn I could barely
make out the name. How many must have seen it
while rambling from or trudging to the ferry
and given it no mind, no second look?
consider articulation, both speech
and the assembly of a joint,
the cooperation of bones and
marijuana; English: Mary Jane:
shoe, or the talentless friend you
secretly love who is also the pretty,
skirted woman in Spiderman who
Despite the brief streaks of self-
belief, a stubborn defeat pervades.
Absent a job, absent a title.
I want to declare: a great undoing has taken place.
And I don’t know where to search for the bricks
that once made up the house of who I used to be.
![In Place of River I’ll Use [God]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ezza-Ahmed.jpg)
By EZZA AHMED
Ten days behind my tongue
summer in the diasporic,
riding thick in the smell of [God]
and fresh cloves.
By [God] I mean the monsoon season
where water appeared in snake-like streams
erasing all traces of my
present tense.
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