My body is powered by internal combustion.
It is a fruity cluster of lust near the office cactus,
especially in that unspectacular moment
it becomes clear, like a snail learning to ignore
instances of sudden pointless touch, how much
not giving a shit takes the wind out of
cruel sails.

After “Elegy with Sympathy” by Emily Skaja

my aunt says her husband
was reincarnated
as a frog, that he floats

The skin on my shoulders peels.
Slack and careless, I was out all
afternoon in a meadow. Ever cannot

Obviously, the word is state. As in
of emergency
yet a body continues to rattle

i wonder if salmon are aware
of their orange pink flesh inside them.
i looked at the cuts at whole foods yesterday

“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?

Translator’s Note: These poems are selected from Esther Ramón’s book Morada (Dwelling), published by Calambur (Barcelona) in 2015. In Dwelling, Ramón organizes the poems in three sections, and does not title the individual poems. I have used the first lines of the poems to function as titles for convenience. The section titles in the book are Excavation, Speed, and Water Stone. The poems included here are from the first section, Excavation.

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 remember you as you were last fall.
You were the grey beret and the calm heart.
In your eyes the flames of twilight fought on.

Ex-boxer still goes to the gym. He’s got nothing else.
Works out.
Slowly and sorta softly.

after ‘O’ by Claire
Wahmanholm
long live our loyalty, how it loops, falls, lumbers, lulls and lists— finally resisting its own limpness.

Loneliness is as much a socio-political condition as an existential one; it is the feeling of being cast adrift, untethered—from both others and society at large. Very few poems capture this feeling for me as powerfully and poignantly as Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Beverly Hills, Chicago” from her 1949 collection, Annie Allen (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950). In this poem, the narrator and her companion (or companions) drive through a white, wealthy neighborhood in Chicago. It is not a coincidence that the speaker is isolated in a car at the dawn of postwar, segregated suburban America. The poem ends:

Author’s Note:
On a damp, wintry day in Paris, I had just closed the shutters when I heard the beating of the wings of a bird springing into flight outside. In that instance, I thought of Pierre Soulages’ abstract paintings created by covering the canvas with textured black paint. In both circumstances, I could not identify pictorial information through vision, but experienced, sensorily, a sentiment even more refined and beautiful. This process of being denied one way of interpretation and given an alternative also struck me as a moment of hope and unexpected delight.

knowledge of all things (when well organized)
fits in the tight space of a
cranial

We “took” walks. I think, because, caesurae are things we drink. At least, like medicine. Their application requires we swallow. The Schuylkill incorporates the Wissahickon near where Manayunk East Falls. Rivers, primordial techniques. How we put things in their place. Water, repeated Information. Solomon’s plume or Solomon’s seal? Forgotten identity questions. Where the river demarcates Mt. Airy, high-altitude drama, we call it gorge. Frequently, you break trod of my footfall. “I know this one,” you say. How we reach for accurate speciation. Differences contingent on what is pendulous v. what flowers in racemes.

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.

“The Mormons Are Coming” opens Dayna Patterson’s recent poetry collection, If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, Winter 2020). The Mormons come with “cheese-and-potato casserole” and “a package of diapers” and “glowing faces with shiny hope.” Then, before a reader gets too comfortable in the lulling repetitions and list of endearing cultural images, the poem swivels: “My daughters ask Why do only boys pass the sacrament?” Then, “My daughters ask Why are all the statues of men?” By the poem’s end, we learn the speaker has “agonize[d] for half a decade’s doubt before deciding to leave.”

When my father died in 2015, my grandparents were suddenly left without their son. I often wonder what the difference is between grieving a child and mourning a parent. “There’s nothing so horrible as outliving your child,” I overheard my Nana tell a friend. “Losing a parent young is one of the worst things that can happen to a person,” my sister explained to one of her friends during another occasion.