![[Freedom Song]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/6780574655_9e0b767324_b.jpg)
what does it mean, to be free? i sip coke at my phuppos, azaadi
on the walls of the university, free kashmir sprawled, azaadi
on my body. when i walk the streets of lahore men stare.
can i write the poem that makes me free, that brings azaadi
to my lips? i say i want to drink from its waters, but i know
what it means to be human & dumb, to pray & when azaadi
comes to shun, to judge & say not like this. control, a bitch
deeply un-free, that sticks me in my own mind, azaadi
Dream 1: In which he annoys her
It was New Year’s Eve when he showed up,
in the sleety weather, in his old flannels,
to knock on our door again. You’re back!
my wife cried. I missed you! He laughed,
and as they hugged he lifted her gently
into the air—that’s when she remembered
he was dead. She stopped crying, annoyed
at his ruse, annoyed that this was the day,
of all days, when the ruses of our dead
would be exposed. Still, for a full minute—
after waking but before opening her eyes—
she let him keep holding her in the air.
Our hour at the clinic, test
results and what the doctor guessed.
Then the bright intensity
out on Industrial Boulevard,
the late October sun so hard
and air so crisp that everything
felt close and brash and nearly stung.
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?
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