By Avot Yeshurun, translated by Dan Alter

A day will come no-one reads my mother's letters.
A pile I have of them.
Not from a her
No word.

By Fran Matos

The skeleton in my neighbor's front yard
holds a sign that reads “come closer for a spell”
but I’m not looking for signs anymore.

By Kerry Kurdziel

The surcharge for being alive
has risen again. The bells won’t stop
weeping. We keep sinking
each other and calling it
tragedy -

By Kaci X. Tavares

It’s been too long since I’ve tried to write my Chinese name 黃曉殿 Húang Xǐaodìan. Muscle memory—barely. In Chinese, your family name comes first, the unit identified before the individual. My family: orphaned sisters who borrow a benefactor’s name. Me: Daybreak over a Palace. I cannot find the palace—

By Salvador Espiru, translated by Andrew Kaufman and Antonio Cortijo Ocana

After, when it had already
caused me much harm and
I could do almost nothing but smile,
I chose the simplest
words, to tell myself

By Saúl Hernández

I lick every drop of sperm off a white man"s navel, / put my lips on his shaft, / his hand grips the back of my neck, / I open my mouth to swallow again, / Tell me something in Spanish. / Sound of my slob in the air, / Tell me something / in Spanish, Tell me / something in Spanish, / Tell me something / in Spanish. /That’s how English asphyxiates me.

By Aura Christi, translated by Gabi Reigh

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
The pleasant tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
A white vulture splits the window
And its wax shadow tips
The whole house skywards.

By Madeleine Voge

I was never chosen to be the naptime fairy, the one who tiptoed around the classroom and waved a wand with bells on the end of it because instead of curling up and closing my eager eyes, I stacked blocks and whispered with Brooks, the boy with long eyelashes who was allergic to bees.

By Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy

Dr. Dutka, who knew nineteen languages
(and with dialects, spoke twenty-four),
reflected the entire world, like an ancient mirror,
and sued his grandchildren for apartment space.

By Owen Torrey

They always arrived in the morning. If there was snow the night before, that is. That winter, there was. They appeared through the window above the sink on the hill. Slashing upwards in loose diagonals. Often in pairs. Often alone. I was alone.

A still life of a glass a lemon-squeezer half / a lemon and a little pot with drinking straws / and the light, so Picasso described one / of his paintings in a letter.

By Matthew Gonzalez

I was at a loss for words when I first read Gonzalo Rojas’s “Numen.” I couldn’t find any solid ground in the distance between the images he uses. After a dive into the body of Spanish-language criticism of Rojas, it’s my position that to evade meaning is the meaning of “Numen.”

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018). She translates contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy and is Assistant Professor of English […]

some thanks some memories preserve shared edges; us bearing our asymmetry, you dogearing seams against my thigh… an infinite double- bind persists: two things might not be equal but i […]

[Moved Somewhere] Moved somewhere. Stayed up to midnight. Flew elsewhere. Came back. Got […]

Don’t look at me I am new and born today Dreaming has changed me The night has Melted off all my influences I saw the big sky turn over twice […]

The King Must Die I do not trust the strength of our gods in the most fertile land I have seen people shredding each other apart our body bursts out […]

be my talismanic property be my new prize for wanting the narcissism of this hot world cut loose like a blimp I came to revirginize my willpower, a white light […]

There was a horse I met, his name was the thought of a tree. I saw him in the backdrop of darkness in my mind, and on a farm, and […]

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Spring Contest, which was judged by Garielle Lutz, Aaron Coleman, Colleen Kinder, and Natasha Rao. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our four wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.