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Welcome to The Common's Tumblr page! The Common publishes fiction, essays, poetry, documentary vignettes, and images that embody particular times and locations both real and imagined.

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“Selections from Sudan, courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum of Art in Jordan, exhibits a distinguished collection of contemporary Arabic art from the start of the 20th century to the present, with frequent new acquisitions from established and emerging artists.“

Check out these phenomenal art pieces, as well as a variety of new poems, short stories, and essays, in Issue 19 of The Common!

Purchase a digital or print copy of the issue here, and don’t forget to visit our website for regularly uploaded, exclusive online pieces.

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If your fall staff meeting doesn’t have apples AND cider donuts, you’re doing it wrong. (at Amherst College) https://www.instagram.com/p/B3U6LTBBJL8/?igshid=1d8rxx7v4ebja

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We’re at the Brooklyn Book Festival 10-6! Come visit us! (at Brooklyn Borough Hall) https://www.instagram.com/p/B2uI8TcBWIO/?igshid=36ijcz1rzhmx

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New dispatch from Alfredo Aguilar

I watch the waves—

They come to rest on the very same shore that answers to two different names—

The waves begin in a place without nations—         They rise and reach towards me—                                                      Then a metal line breaks them in two.

Read this poetic dispatch from Alfredo Aguilar about Friendship Park, and the impact of borders on human relationships. 

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Recording by Matt W. Miller

“ For a moment I was a failed skip of stone sunk into the river for a moment I was the river purling in long last shadows of September for a moment I was a skinny grizzly climbing from a beer can”

Check out Matt W. Miller’s reading of his poem “Autobiography” on our website now:

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We are open for submissions!

Do you have place-based poems, essays, or short stories that you’re hoping to publish? This is your chance! Take a look at our submission guidelines and send us your best work! 

[thecommonmag]

New poems by Nathan McClain, Sara Elkamel, and Brian Simoneau

NATHAN MCCLAIN | The Flowers

| At the Park, a Boy’s Birthday

SARA ELKAMEL | Instructions for getting around a desert

BRIAN SIMONEAU |  Each morning I get up I die a little

NATHAN MCCLAIN

The flowers

in the greenhouse now flowers

in the supermarket rubber-bound

clipped from wherever

they seemed almost to nod

their agreement with what the breeze once said

now flowers in some glass vase

on the dining room table where no one eats

What race they are doesn’t matter nor if

their stems are thorny you see

They’re just flowers They die

You walk by them all the time

hardly thinking twice about their names

Read more here

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New essay by Sarah Van Bonn

If you have to die somewhere (and you do), why not up there—in forward motion, encased in this treasured, suspended place, between being and becoming, then and now, A and B, here and there, below and above, above and beyond, self and other, a space that exists nowhere else, the space of your greatest advances, where you’ve most loved the gift of the world and the life it gave you? 

Sarah Van Bonn’s essay “How To Cure Your Fear of Flying” uses the fear of airplane catastrophes to wrestle with a deeper sense of dread that comes with the passage of time. 

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Recording from Rowan Beaird

In all the early photos of my life, you are wearing a long skirt. It is pleated, with an elastic waistband, patterned with purple and red Japanese flowers. I imagine you purchased it from one of the consignment stores in Lincoln Square, their window displays nothing more than dresses and shirts hung on latticed wood wound with fake ivy. 

Listen to the recording of Rowan Beaird reading an excerpt from her Issue 17 fiction piece “Trousseau.” 

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Poetic dispatch from Sofia Belimova

These wafts, imperceptible by the extant senses,

disappear when we look for them, 

just as the Andromeda galaxy spinning towards us 

fades into a cloud when we search for its guiltless face. 

A “cosmic pile-up.” Four billion years to live.

Rising sophomore Sofia Belimova brings a poetic dispatch that dwells on life at Amherst College. 

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A not-to-be-missed Dispatch from growing up in Jamaica - “Island Lessons.” Link in bio. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1HkcWMBRNv/?igshid=1dwkdop3k6hfc

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Susan Tacent reviews Maria Terrone's collection of essays

Maria Terrone’s grandparents were among the estimated nine million people who emigrated from Italy between 1881 and 1927. While her parents were born in the United States, her connection to Italy is deep, informing her identity and experiences as much as being a lifelong New Yorker has.

In At Home in the New World, Terrone shares how she has been shaped by this double set of roots. A collection of 21 essays, the book is divided into five sections — “Hide and Seek,” “Obsessions,” “The Italian Thing,” “At Work: Factories and Fifth Avenue,” and “From New York to the World” — that follow a loose progression from childhood to first jobs to her working life as an editor. Terrone is also an accomplished poet, and her poet's sensibility lights up the prose — her sentences are shapely, lyrical, and full of descriptions that bring her words to life.

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By Hisham Bustani

"The simultaneous, yet separate, publication of the English translations and their Arabic originals is significant on a number of levels. Firstly, it affirms that the English and Arabic texts are intimately connected and yet distinct; that translation is creative work in its own right. Just as dual-language publications juxtapose original-language texts with their translations, so The Common and Akhbar Al Adab appear side-by-side, each on their side of the ocean, with just a few thousand kilometres between them."

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Poetry recording by Angie Macri

as a girl approaches a mirror, not yet a queen, and maybe never, seeing in the water no man’s voice to answer, to say you are better than another [...]

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Olga Zilberbourg reviews Akram Aylisli's novel

Following the publication of “Stone Dreams” in a Russian magazine, and likely as a result of a direct command of Azerbaijani leadership, Aylisli tells us, his fellow villagers, each of whom he knew personally, staged and videotaped a bonfire of his books. Aylis was no longer his, he laments in the essay, and would never be his again. But the morning after watching the video of the book burning, he was rejoicing. “The Aylis taken away from me that day by the potent hand of the authorities hadn’t been my Aylis for a long time already. It was their Aylis: without God and without Memory, without History, and without a Biography.”

Read Olga Zilberbourg’s analysis of Akram Aylisli’s “Farewell, Aylis,” which reckons with decades of Soviet violence and oppression in Azerbaijan. 

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Four Poems by J.J. Starr

I see a woman  

who looks like you and it makes me stop. You’re not even dead                           yet but sometimes it feels that way.

I’m sad about it, I am. It’s not something I put on my wish list.

I want to disappear when I see a man                           with the right kind of mustache.

I know you know what I mean, the things that pull us back

—back again to the rooms and the smell of them.

You’re so far away from me. I don’t just mean I haven’t seen you. Why shouldn’t we have formed a family without you? Don’t                           we all need one?

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Place-Based Interview with Miriam Sagan

Santa Fe was first a Pueblo, then a Spanish capital, then Mexican, and eventually part of the United States. But it often feels unlike much of the United States. Local culture and food and music, as well as art and literature, is still very Hispanic. It still has some of the feeling of Mexico. You can feel history in the central Plaza, by the cathedral, but really anywhere. There is so much archeology, you might find a pottery sherd or a stone scrapper in your backyard from the days of Paleo hunters.

Miriam Sagan discusses food, culture, and topography of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an Ask a Local interview.