Hang us together by our chests // calcium rich and hovering over // fresh pollen // floating // away from the source // gentle atop apples // rotten before they even fall // am I filled with
pollen or dust // who knows but me // in my head are bees swarming inwards // in my body

Don’t weed. Look out the windows at the towering weeds.
Hate the weeds. Don’t look out the windows.
Don’t get out of bed. Let the weeds grow taller.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our annual Spring Contest, which was judged by Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. Winners and runner ups will be posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2020.

My sister climbed into bed with me, her body is full of milk and water and a baby inside her stomach that she doesn’t want.
She is 17, and I am 14 and baby is 86 days of fluid and fantasy

You took the cloth and washed my body,
whispered every grace,
“Alhamdulillah, She lived a good life.”

“Silence is so accurate.”—Mark Rothko
That winter when winter was thick as a knot, Rothko sat
sluggish in long-johns and warm black

By Winniebell Xinyu Zong

My mother knows how
to choose the best: the ones
with smooth pale skin.

The Washerwomen’s strike is assuming vast proportions and despite the apparent independence of the white people, is causing quite an inconvenience among our citizens….There are some families in Atlanta who have been unable to have any washing done for more than two weeks.

—Atlanta Constitution, 26 July 1881

A.
Draw a circle around yourself
and pray seventy years
for rain that it might come

In this interview, Columbia Journal online arts editor Jai Hamid Bashir talks to poet Jane Hirshfield about her ninth poetry collection ​Ledger​ ​(Knopf, March 10, 2020), a deeply observant and stunning text about our species relationship with this Earth, beauty, and ourselves.

The word BARE.
Everyone
Exposed

Crepuscular means
“active at twilight,”
but zoology does tend toward drama.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2019 Winter Contest, which was judged by Ruth Madievsky, Ada Calhoun, and Ottessa Moshfegh. 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.

The accomplishment of No Roses from My Mouth by renowned Ugandan feminist and queer rights advocate Stella Nyanzi, it not so much that the poetry collection was written in jail, but because it’s as thorny as the writing that got her imprisoned.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural Black History Month Special Issue, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. We want to thank everyone who submitted for creating art and sharing their work with us, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. All winners and runner-ups will be published on Wednesday, February 19th, or shortly thereafter.

The vanishing trail led to a tangle of chicories —
to the scythes still swinging over the bloodied
beer cans, whiskey bottles, oak tree stump

I woke today with the same attitude I always have
one fist cured and another open.
I call this the Black girl stance.

Again we’re talking of “conservation” and “efforts”
not of, say, a rainforest, but of landscapes
in oils or acrylics, and I was never an art student

Danez Smith’s newest collection, Homie, takes their readers on a dazzlingly divine, chaotic, radically loving, and politically astute hang-out. Smith is a black and queer poet-performer who also wrote the acclaimed collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017). They craft their follow-up book to come out swinging as a commemoration of friends, the black community, and the queer self. Smith observes the world around them with a sense of beautiful kindness.