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2024 Online Fiction Contest Finalist: Brine

By Connor White

When Walt pulled the van into a parking spot beside the baseball fields, the Watkins kid was standing out in centerfield, unaccompanied, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a mitt hatted on his head as he beat the carcass of a dead raccoon with a stick.

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2024 Online Fiction Contest Winner: Circulation Line

By Jisoo Hope Yoon

In the dark I dream only of bottomless mimosas. When I wake my neck is stiff, a sharp sideways pain like the grind of a screw rusted orange. I right my head and immediately lock eyes with a middle-aged man sitting across from me, too-tight-suit revealing the contour of a soju belly from nights downing pork grease and alcohol to satisfy his boss’s whims.

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2024 Online Translation Contest Winner: Mériéma

By Isabelle Eberhardt, translated by Donald Mason

A low sky, opaque, incandescent; a dull, rayless, burning sun. On the dust about, covering everything, and on the white and grey fronts of the houses, the blinding heat, unrelenting, reverberates, seeming to emanate from some interior hearth hidden within the earth. Along the angled crests of the hills, kindled with dryness, some low flames lie darkly brooding—the reddish-coloured smoke amassing behind the mountains about Figuig.

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2024 Online Nonfiction Contest Winner: The Asian Koel

By Clement Yue

Nobody loves this bird. Very few even really know what it looks like. It perches hidden in thick arboreal foliage⎯black plumage indistinguishable from the canopic shadows. I used to think it was yellow, until someone pointed out to my embarrassment that I was looking at orioles all my life.

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2024 Online Poetry Contest Finalist: Ode to Finales

By Kiersten Czuwala

After dinner, my boyfriend tells me that I should learn to slaughter my own meat.

That actually, farmers have pinpointed down to the angle

exactly how to position a barrel against a cow’s skull

to flood the hollow of the bullet hole

with serotonin.

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The Winners of the 2024 Online Contest

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2024 Online Contest, which was judged by Jonas Eika, Jeanna Kadlec, Megan Fernandes, and Mónica de la Torre. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

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God’s Touch in Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera

By Ali Banach

The work’s size, its breathless metaphors, and its coquette-ish design all point toward contemporary trends that have spawned due to digitally-minded, attention-deficit reading lives. However, as a departure from other contemporary fragmentation, the book’s preoccupation with mysticism creates an internal justification for such formal choices.

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Doubting the Flare

By Casey Brooks

Somewhere there is a heartbeat on the bus. To sit upright was a seldom ignorable terror, no matter how much has been lost. It makes it bulge out, defiling form and function. Today was different, the earth was, for the first time, in transit with a radiant body. Its light melted away the sticky mold that was a life resigned to semi-consciousness.

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Story & Five Poems

By Ivy Char

It was Celia who first called me H. Although we were close, having known each other since kindergarten, I had learned to stray from topics that might turn to points of contention, as was apparently the case with the letter. And besides, there existed the distinct possibility, advanced by the satisfied look on her face, that this was all some sort of friendly challenge. “Why ‘H?’” I wondered, and wondered often.

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The Winners of the 2023 Print Contest

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2023 Print Contest, which was judged by Maya Binyam, Andrew Leland, Donna Masini, and Samuel Rutter. 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.

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Two Stories

By Maeve Barry

Stefan’s adopted mom told him I got into Showstoppers cause I’d have no problem wearing the skanky outfit. Stefan’s adopted mom told him this to make him feel better because he didn’t get in. He told me. I am eight and three quarters and I don't care.

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When It Comes Down to It

By Rachael Greene

Everything you think you might do in a threatening situation melts away. This is it, I thought. Though my mind could not quite accept what it was. My hands raised of their own volition, pointlessly, to shield my more vulnerable parts, and my mouth uttered, like an invocation, the name of the only person who could hear me.

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Morning

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.

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Dear End Times,

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 -

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