Texas | The Common

The Marker

January 30, 2024 Fiction

Dispatch crackles over the cruiser’s radio: brushfire on Ranch Road 580.

Frank lights a cigarette, takes a deep pull. His shift over, he listens, unobligated, as Latimer asks dispatch to confirm the fire’s location.

He stares through the windshield at his house, a squat brick ranch. Scuffed exterior and summer-fried lawn identical to the others on the block. The front window drapes are pulled back, giving the house a grin, like an old friend commiserating: Seven years left on your note, Frank. Three years short of retirement. Tough math.

I’ll sell the place when I retire, Frank thinks, not for the first time. Move to Kerrville, or Boerne, or Bandera. Find a part-time security job to help make ends meet. Latimer talks up New Mexico. Strikes Frank as too far from central Texas, too far from the remains of the life he and Lizzie shared before she passed.

Drapes back means his daughter Caitlyn is up and getting ready for work. Two weeks before she’s off to college in Austin. Who knows if she comes back? Live your entire life in a place, can come to hate it.

Sisters

November 6, 2023 Farmworker, Issue 26, Issue 26 Poetry, Poetry

By MIGUEL M. MORALES
with Deb Morales, MyLinda Morales Hutchings, Grace Morales

I grew up in a farmworking family.
No, that’s not accurate—it’s incomplete.
I grew up in a family of farmworking women.
The hands of our sisters, tías, cousins, mothers,
and abuelas have worked the fields, worked to feed us,
worked to raise us, worked to protect and provide for us.
I love my mom but the truth is that my sisters raised me.
Farmwork would not survive without women,
nor would farmworker families.

El cuerpo avisa

November 6, 2023 Farmworker, Issue 26, Issue 26 Poetry, Poetry

By LUPE MENDEZ

Todo mi maíz se llevó, ni pa’comer me dejó
El Barzón.
—Luis Pérez Meza

Esas tierras del rincón,
I look at them como un buey pando,
feeling the dry earth, crunch under
my boots. Es Julio, y si sigue asi,
dirán que es sequía. I pray it is not.

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

September 21, 2023 Farmworker, Poetry, Translation

Poems by JORDAN ESCOBAR, OSWALDO VARGAS, ARTURO CASTELLANOS JR., and MIGUEL M. MORALES.

This fall, half of The Common’s new issue will be dedicated to a portfolio of writing and art from the farmworker community: over a hundred pages filled with the stories, essays, poems, and artwork of immigrant agricultural workers. The portfolio, co-edited by Miguel M. Morales, highlights the work of twenty-seven contributors with roots in this community.

An online portfolio will also accompany the print issue, giving more space for these important perspectives. This feature is the first of several that will publish throughout the fall. Click the FARMWORKER tag at the bottom of the page to read more, as pieces are added.

Bat Season in Austin

September 8, 2021 Dispatches

BY SARAH GIRAGOSIAN

Austin, TX

The warm May evening fairly sizzled with bats. Out from under the crannies of Congress Avenue Bridge, Mexican free-tailed bats slipped out in threes, then tens, then hundreds, and flooded the Austin night, sipping from the skies tens of thousands of pounds of insects, as they did every spring and summer night. I felt at once the tickling of wings behind my ears and began shivering uncontrollably. No, fortunately not a bat—just the flick of a stranger’s ponytail at the back of my neck. But the shivery feeling remained; that contact with a stranger was a switch point in my mind. Any kind of creature, wonderful or mundane, slinked in the nooks and crannies of the city celebrated for its weirdness.

Histories

July 28, 2021 Dispatches

By SARAH DUNPHY-LELII

Austin, Texas

I once dated a bull rider, which is very interesting, I still find. He was at the time no longer a bull rider, he had rather been one in his youth, but this lingered, as you might expect. This was in a part of the country where bull riders are not so rare as they are in the northeast, though still rare enough for people to lean forward when they hear. The only time he visited with my family we played a board game where everyone shouts out words, and would you believe a card came up “Things You Can Ride.” Even this cosmic wink could not keep together two with only the two-step in common. But the two-step itself married me to rambling dancehalls for joyful months after, a sweating Dos Equis in one hand and the other free for the taking.

Gródek

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By BRUCE BOND

When the smoke cleared and took with it the sirens
and the uniforms strung across our sofas,

what remained were rivers, mist, whisper as a habit,
red dawn in the eyes of the sleep-deprived.

In the brush, here and there, beside the highway,
the revenant scent of metal and decay.

Southtown

February 11, 2020 Fiction

By ANDREW PORTER

The other day I was visited by a memory from the early days of my marriage, when my wife and I still lived in the old house on the south side of San Antonio. This was when we were both in our early twenties and nearly broke all the time, always on the verge of eviction from the house we rented for $520 a month. Still, we had a lot of friends back then—more friends than we have now—and these friends were always coming over with bottles of wine and half-finished paintings they wanted to show us, poems they wanted to read us, songs they wanted to play for us. There were a lot of parties back then—parties almost every night—and Madeline and I, still in the early years of our marriage, still childless, were somehow always hosting these parties in our house, though I can’t remember ever sending out formal invitations or even ever shopping in advance for them. They were more like spontaneous affairs, and all we really provided, aside from good will, and a kind of open door policy when it came to strangers, was the house itself.

Essential Summer Reads 2019

July 13, 2019 News and Events

With July well underway, we’ve put together a list of transportive pieces that encapsulate the spirit of summer—the dust above the country roads, the coolness of the waterfronts, the anticipation of autumn, and of course, the sticky, melting sweetness of ice cream. Take a trip through space and time with these summery selections.

Review of Throw: A Novel

June 12, 2019 Reviews

Book by RUBÉN DEGOLLADO

Reviewed by JUNE GERVAIS

“If I’m going to tell you the story of how I lost two people who were closer than blood to me, I have to begin here in Dennett, Texas, during the summer between the sophomore and junior years of my life. This story begins as it ends, with me, Cirilo Izquierdo, waiting for what all of us spend our whole lives waiting for: not to be alone anymore.” — Throw: A Novel, by Rubén Degollado

If I offer you the words contemplative novel, you may not immediately picture—for example—someone getting stabbed in the leg with a pencil. You may not picture a tangle of high schoolers fighting and flirting, fueling rumors and throwing shade and roaming lowrider car shows.

All posts tagged: Texas

The Marker

Sisters

El cuerpo avisa

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

Bat Season in Austin

Histories

Gródek

Southtown

Essential Summer Reads 2019

Review of Throw: A Novel

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