After four days of fever, I want to unzip my skin, abandon this body too ripe with sickness and strange. I feel wind-dropped and boozy, but I force myself toward useful action. Tonight, I will cook dinner, the way a good wife and mother should. Poor inferma, my husband says, we can get take out, but I will not be deterred. Go rest, you’ll feel better. No.

My German companion and I sing as we walk. She’s into the Backstreet Boys; I go for Fats Domino.

The week before Christmas, an Italian guy from the Internet scoops you from your white house in a red car. You climb in and fold your hands over your legs, wishing they were bare so you could feel the warmth of your skin. It is cold, though people keep saying that winter here doesn’t begin until the solstice.

By giving it away. When I first learned that the line was not my lover’s—that it was, instead, a Narcotics Anonymous platitude which I might have as easily read on a proselytic tee shirt—I was, I admit, let down. When we’d first met, he claimed to be a poet: a self-conscious one, anyway, and a bad one; and it was for that reason, he’d told me, that he never shared his work. Since we’d been teenagers—me, a young fourteen; him, an old seventeen—he had been stashing his writing away as if it were its own kind of felony, as if he meant to insulate me from some further poison. Call it 2012. His Rottweiler whining at my knee. When I first read those words in his hand, in the chicken-scratched letter telling me he meant to get clean, I was all but overcome with an urge to assure him that he wasn’t dirty. When I found, rifling through his drawers after the third overdose—call it 2015—the pamphlet from which he’d excised them, an otherwise bland and featureless, anonymous phrasebook for the prodigal junkie, I kept it. Not because I saw in it anything that might help me, but because there among its occasional underscores and sparse marginalia I thought I could intuit his shadow. Not so much a ghost, nothing half-animate winking in and out of my peripheral vision, but a shadow, static. Something of him—if not original and true to his interior, a close facsimile at least—at last pinned down. I had found no papers in his desk but our rolling papers. There was no secret book of poems, no journal, no literary debris, no accumulated backlog of holiday cards, not one of my own belabored and overzealous love letters—only that thin, lonely book. Call it a relic, an artifact; call me his archaeologist. My first lover, my subcutaneous lover, my subterranean lover, my lover in the dirt—my lover to whom that book would also offer little help.

An internet meme is information ballistics. Fast, impactful, and easily weaponized, memes are often esoteric instructions directing ways to perceive and think about the world. When politicized, memes can have propagandistic power over the imagination, especially if there is a message that aligns with one’s own political beliefs.

My partner thinks I put my desk below the towel rack in my bathroom to hide from my loving parents, but that’s not the whole story. Writing fiction, to my attorney parents, financially literate sisters, and medical student partner, is a bizarre effort. They wonder what facts I work off of. Am I reading into everything they do, how they do it, and why? What does “telling the truth” mean, if mine’s the only voice on the page? My family nervously eyes my laptop and notepad. I imagine they are curious, and insecure. We’ve all been living together for three months, quarantined beneath the same butter-lettuce green rafters. Who, but them, could I be harvesting for material?

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx wrote that while people make history, they do so under conditions not of their choosing. In the United States, I doubt anyone hoping for change would choose today’s conditions if given the option. To name a few: an economic crisis that has left millions unemployed and unable to pay rent, a militarized police force willing to brutalize even the most peaceful protestor, and armed white supremacist vigilantes emboldened by a president whose recommended cure for a global pandemic is to inject Lysol.

“I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.” —Ralph Ellison. We understand art-making as a kind of uprising—an uprising of spirit, an uprising against limits, an uprising of new ways to think about and perceive the world around us. How do we imagine the polity in our art, to paraphrase Robert Hass, and how does that energize our politics?

If you’re all worked up about what the now infamous Harper’s Magazine piece of summer 2020, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” is either saying or suggesting about “cancel culture,” then you might be interested to learn that the Supreme Court already ruled on this—sort of—in a notable First Amendment case, U.S. v. Alvarez (2012).

As I drove the Project Reach-Out van up Central Park West, I spotted a homeless woman I’d been searching for. Helen looked decades older than her mid-sixties. She was sitting on a bench and owning the sidewalk. Her belongings—a rolling cart and multitude of bags— were spread every which way, causing pedestrians to step into the street to avoid her things.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners for our Special Issue on Loneliness. In selecting finalists, our dedicated Reading Board worked closely with Shir Kehila, online nonfiction editor; Sylvia Gindick, online poetry editor; Victoria Rucinski, online fiction editor, and Eiliza Callahan, art editor.

Columbia Journal is delighted to announce the shortlist for our Special Issue on Loneliness. Our dedicated team of readers and editors culled through a pool of more than 400 submissions that were each uniquely moving.

I’m standing in the little girls’ clothing section at Wal-Mart trying to hang up a fluffy pink tutu skirt. The handheld scanner is balanced in my blue smock pocket against my hip. It’s the kind of skirt I would have loved pre-transition—bright and girly, a hint of fairy queen, perfect for fanning out by the heater or spinning in the kitchen like a ballerina. $8.96, reads the tag. I don’t see any other skirts like it; they must be sold out. I place the skirt somewhere it doesn’t belong since it’s already homeless. I take a step back.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century is a collection of writing by disabled people, edited by disabled activist, media maker and research consultant Alice Wong. Founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community supporting and amplifying disability media and culture, Wong also co-produces and hosts the Disability Visibility podcast and partners in numerous other disability rights initiatives. This collection, as Wong writes in her introduction, “brings all of these collaborations, connections and joys to the page.”

When we got inside and mother started talking about how many pills, doses of radiation, months she’d live if this and this and this went that way, I realized the worst moment of our family’s history could be preserved. And so, quietly, I took the picture. Then I took two more.

I remember the first time I did it: it was an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, after class. By the end of my seven years in LA, I was so good at shoplifting clothes that the maiden voyage story didn’t mean much. I had the hands for shoplifting—delicate, dexterous and soft—comrades would say. My face at the time, which was young and distinctly sharp (but not exaggeratedly so,) was not out of place in global retail havens either.

I was half asleep when Ma whispered into my ear that it was time to go. The sun had not yet risen, but light crept into the room from the half-opened window. I pulled off the chadar—the thin blanket we use in the warm summer months in Palakkad—an extra layer of skin that embraces us even when we don’t need its coarse cover.

It feels almost serendipitous that Olivia Laing’s essay collection Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency has been published during a global pandemic. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, another painful reminder of persisting police brutality against Black lives, an outpouring of collective rage and grief has led to protests across the country. These protests are happening against the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-related deaths, a failing federal government and economic collapse.

UPDATE: Submissions for this special issue are now closed. We look forward to reaching out to our winners in the near future. Keep checking our site for upcoming special issue and contest submission opportunities (and for daily content, of course), or submit for regular publication at any time to our open categories, which are updated in the Submit section at the top right of our homepage or viewable in our Submittable portal.

In this interview, Jasmine Vojdani speaks with writer Porochista Khakpour about fragmented identity, being Iranian in America, regret, and her new book, The Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. In The Brown Album, Khakpour traces lifelong experiences of alienation and cultural confusion. Her family left revolutionary Iran and relocated to Los Angeles a year after her birth, but this was not the glitzy, gilded L.A. of Tehrangeles so often associated with Iranian America. These essays recount Khakpour’s horror of appearing “other” as a child, her uncanny attempts to alter her appearance and affinities in hopes of belonging, and the ways that 9/11 ultimately upended her understanding of her place as an immigrant in America.