Celebrate the year’s end with work by powerful younger poets new to our pages: R. A. Villanueva, James Byrne, and Nathaniel Bellows
For this month’s poetry feature, we are publishing a collection of seven new poems by four The Common contributors.
Hard to believe that, after all of it,
in bed for good now, knowing you haven’t done
one thing of any lasting benefit
or grasped how to be happy, or had fun,
Strange to go back
To the house I’d left
Eight months before.
Empty now, sold
Short, short-sale, mortgage
Underwater, upsidedown.
A sound I hope to hear no more
than once—faint chime, small ring
produced by a wedding ring, rose-gold, flung
five flights to the cobbles of Rue Valadon
from the closet-sized kitchen where, wrung
dry, come to the end of endurance and all sense
of possibility, I had thrown it out the window.
By DAVID GAVIN
About twelve years ago I went into a museum in southern Turkey:
Antalya, a resort town on the Mediterranean. I’m not really
the type of person who hangs around museums looking
at artifacts behind glass
By ANDREA SCOTT
And the clucking tongue of a woman in her black chador . . .
And the feeling that this may be less than what’s real . . .
I cannot translate what the old man has said, grinning toothless from
the computer screen.
He’s cursing the Mullahs and all that’s hypocritically holy in Iran.
This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry.
This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams.
Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour.
As the deaf-mute grocery clerk
puckers curious to a chorus “O”
to ask what kind of mushrooms
he should be ringing up, I think
of Ortiz and last night’s double
By L. S. KLATT
You don’t fall far from the tree. Is that because you are adamant? In Adam’s fall/ we fell all, bruised? Software? What keeps us processing even if besotted? Knowledge? What’s the big idea? Is it my soul in your interface?
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