Have you ever watched someone eat an orange and not had the urge to ask, Could I have a piece, please? If you have, then I’m afraid you might be stronger than most / The orange is dined on delicately / She requires care, from start to finish / Even the tearing of her sheath must be done with care or else you sacrifice parts of her fleshy sweetness—first to the rind, then to the compost […]

Superman has nothing on my older brother when he’s high on crack. Muscles tensed, jaw clenched, underwear drenched in piss, standing in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up, years before her death and still more before Tommy winds up beaten down in a half-way house for Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA) patients […]

The only son Garry wanted wasn’t even a blood son. A reject, a castoff. Thomas, this non-son, had a forehead scooped into a kind of slight horn. Pinched-out lips. Laugh like a throttled chicken. But Garry knew from his years training airborne cadets that without him, the boy’s life was a coin flip: Thomas, a fatherless fuck-up, or Thomas, a true leader of men.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Print Contest, which was judged by Jonathan Escoffery, Qian Julie Wang, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Valzhyna Mort. […]

“What would the history of literature look like if it began, not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes, but with a woman from ancient Iraq, who sang her hymns to […]

Today at work I walked in on Sarah in the work bathroom adjusting her outfit in the full-length mirror, she jumped when I opened the door. I found myself thinking […]

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 […]

I cried while sitting on the toilet the other day. It’s not what you think, I promise. The culprit was not a sour taste of spoiled food or night of drinking […]

What does it take to achieve our childhood dreams? What do our ambitions teach us about ourselves? Since its publication in 1998, Homer Hickam’s coming-of-age memoir Rocket Boys, about the […]

A Review of the Monk’s Work, Teachings, and Legacy 1 Year After His Death Known for his teachings on Buddhism and how to bring mindfulness—the idea of being aware of […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]

Cheyenne and I are in her bathroom applying our makeup under the drop lights her dad got for cheap. It’s her very own half bath with double sinks so we […]

2022 Columbia Journal Print Contest – Submissions Open from December 15, 2022, to December 31, 2022 January 15, 2023 The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2022 Print […]

My sister’s the one who ran away on a headless horse. She escaped with her bruises to a land that didn’t know her, built a room with sixteen walls and […]

It’s not even noon, but the sun’s way high, and Johnny’s on the jukebox. I’m sitting in the world’s shiniest diner, staring at the woman who has the most beautiful […]

This is not a lie: My interview for a job as an inmate tutor in the GED program at a federal prison was two questions long. Question One. Can you […]

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 […]

This place is haunted. Or it could be, with its bravado of wind and rolling whitecaps and the rhythm imbued by waves slapping the rock wall. All an implication of […]