Mary South’s debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, presents a delightful opportunity to be as unsettled by your literary fiction as you are by your News Feed. The obsessions in these stories—loneliness, shame, the taboos surrounding the expression of desire and need—emerge as her characters often unsuccessfully attempt to tackle their grief, using technology to abate it in ways that are destined to spectacularly and tragically fail.

The three poems here are from a new manuscript, A Thousand Oars in the Water – 45 Versions from Sappho to Claribel Alegría, and were rendered from other translations cribs, and notes.

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

The thing about telling a story—any story—is that you inevitably find yourself defending it before an audience. This is true of board room discussions, it is true of testimonies. And it is true of writing. If you’re lucky enough to escape the travails of workshops or writer’s rooms unscathed, you’re confronted with well-meaning readers who ask you, in a room full of people, to defend your fiction.

Nigerian writer Ukamaka Olisakwe’s upcoming novel, Ogadinma Or, Everythng Will be All Right does a thorough job of painting the different shades of patriarchy. Expected in June 2020 by the Indigo Press, the book is set in the 1980s Nigeria and chronicles the life of Ogadinma, a 17-year-old girl, whose dream of pursuing a university education gets thwarted by a rich lawyer.

Anne-Flore arrived early one dawn as the inescapable proof of the mercy of God. She was born in October 2019 during the height of what came to be known in Haiti as peyilok, a country-wide lockdown stretching over a period of about three months that was radical and revolutionary, but also violent, disorganized and ultimately trying for all parties involved. The early morning of Anne-Flore’s birth was similar to many others during that period. It followed a long, tension-filled night, the darkness of which was broken by barricade fires, and the light of rubber tires aflame. Whirling smoke suffocated the moon and the stars.

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.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s journey begins among the tumbleweeds of Texas and finishes with a crawl over the Rockies and a descent into the fertile Snake River Valley. Her new book, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, is an attempt to reconcile what she calls “the divide” between urbanites like herself and Americans living in the flyover states.

Bill Murray won’t leave the apartment. Get off the couch, I say. Bill Murray gives me his hangdog look. It’s not as attractive in real life as it is in the movies. I don’t feel moved when you look at me that way, I say. That’s what they always say, Bill Murray says. Bill Murray puts a cushion over his head as if that resolves it. I stamp my feet and point to the door. Leave, I say. From under the cushion comes a snore. I know you can hear me, I say. Outside, birds are waking. Inside, Bill Murray is fake sleeping. I’m warning you, I say. But Grace will miss me, Bill Murray says, voice muffled. Grace is asleep in her crib. Grace won’t even notice, I say, but I hesitate as always and Bill Murray stays.

The man lies face down on the pavement. I stare at his back and try to focus on a point to see whether or not it is rising or falling. It is difficult to distinguish a flutter of wind that ripples across the surface of his shirt from genuine breath. At four o’clock, the light is so honeyed and abundant that it catches the glint of mica in the pavement, making this task nearly impossible. I want to be close to a dead body so I can have an experience, like it is some holy relic that has the power to change me. I could tell my husband that I had had a very interesting afternoon. The anecdote might even have a life longer than that—I could feasibly trot it out at dinner parties for the next month or so.

I crouched on the carpeted floor in front of my space heater, my eyes swollen from crying. For days it had been giving off less and less heat, shutting down for a few minutes at a time before willing itself back to life. Now the heater huffed its final hot breaths. When it died completely, I did not think, “I need to grow a garden.”

The End
As the poet David Berman once said: just because everyone has died so far / doesn’t mean that we’re going to.
He killed himself, which goes to show that poems are easy to misunderstand, at least according to my students. I don’t teach anymore.

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.

The nurse greets Leo from behind the apartment’s steel security door. Starched white uniform and too much Chanel No. 5, a paper nurse’s hat pinned to her messy, grey-streaked up-do. Leo’s no stranger to hospitals—he only just stretched the Bellevue psych ward I.D. bracelet off his wrist during the ferry ride over from lower Manhattan. But until now he’s never seen a nurse in anything but teal scrubs and a lanyard. Staten Island, always keeping it old school.

“Everything starts with garlic,” Grandma Sally said as I stretched on tiptoe. As I balanced gripping the metal oven door handle when I was hip high to her. As she pressed her belly into the oven door rather than tell me to stop. As my bare toes crunched papery garlic skin that had fluttered to the floor with the linoleum divot in front of the oven.

All through that year, we believed in magic: magic that had the power to set things right, turn the ship around, get us out of there unscathed.

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.”

People always asked what we were doing there. The rehearsed line I said when people asked was, “We’re expatriates.” In my eight-year-old mind this word that came out like scrap metal meant, “white-people permanently not in white-people land.” That was the only way I had ever heard it applied. I knew I wasn’t Mexican. I didn’t consider myself American. Most of our friends, though fluent in Spanish, were other white people from English-speaking countries. They too were expatriates.

Although Kay Ryan has earned nearly every accolade a poet can dream of—Pulitzer Prize winner, Guggenheim Fellow, National Humanities Medal recipient, and Poet Laureate of the United States, to name a few—Synthesizing Gravity is her first collected work of prose. The title comes from her commentary on Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s poems: “They must synthesize gravity, direction, time, substance. They can’t use anyone else’s.” This idea feels both essential and antithetical to Ryan’s selected prose, where her unique style so often comes out of commenting on the work of others.