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.

I cannot even fathom the fear my black friends in the United State face in their day-to-day lives, while buying groceries, selling loosies, jogging, or even making a phone call in their own backyard. The murder of George Floyd in police custody is not an anomaly. His murder is reflective of global systemic abuse against dark skin, and his death speaks to the intergenerational and ongoing legacy of racism that prevents equal access to justice and the chance to live a life free of prejudice. I’ve only encountered glimpses of everyday racism across the world, and the encounters make up my nightmares. It frightens me to imagine living like this across generations for four hundred years.

Rome 32 BCE
1. There are no memories here. There is, instead, a rose garden on a hill.
2. Dark vines clutch broken columns.
3. Blossoms swell like wounds

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.”

The genre of literary fiction in the Indian subcontinent has always been hard to come by. I think fondly of fiction by Ruskin Bond, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh. Then I think a little more because I want to think of women. I think of Arundhati Roy. I stay in that little bubble, re-reading The God of Small Things, over and over.

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the violent confrontations between gay rights activists and police after a raid on The Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned gay bar. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Pride march to honor the riots and subsequent uprising. In years since, Pride celebrations have morphed into slick displays of corporate-backed consumption and rainbow capitalism; radical origins are glossed over in favor of thirty-day calendar acts replete with free rainbow pens and Jell-O shots, large displays of police surveillance, and police marching along parade routes that feature flashy narratives that skew white, cisgender, male.

Hay caballos en su pubis, hay caballos en su vientre, en
su pelvis hay una gaita algebraica, hay unos engranajes
de volteo, hay galápagos, en su vientre. Hay galápagos y
golpes: galopes.

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

Embrace reduced visitor capacities as a temporary reality for art museums

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 saw my father’s penis for the first time in my life today.

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:

On what grounds do we allow ourselves to be policed? The presumed relationship between police and civilians is one of safety. In general, we do not allow people to hold us against our will or to assault us, and we make an exception for the police on the condition that their right to violence will lead to a safer community. We understand it as a controlled violence to prevent uncontrollable violence. Political scientists refer to the legal use of violence by government agents as the “state monopoly on violence.” It is a term that, whether intentional or not, reflects a capitalist worldview. What, then, happens when police violence itself becomes uncontrollable? What happens when the monopoly on violence, much like any other monopoly, becomes an unfettered source of public harm? What happens when it becomes clear to the public that you cannot regulate a monopoly?

I always took pride in never writing in bed. My rule was that I could only write once I was dressed, out of the apartment, and sipping coffee somewhere (preferably by a window), next to a stranger whose presence held me accountable for putting words on the page.

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.

As a general rule, a single person should not live with a couple – it is a recipe for heartbreak – but back in those days, the three architecture students did not know that. They found a cavernous apartment near the university and moved in together. Back in those days, rents in Cambridge were low, but this place was ridiculously cheap, eight hundred dollars a month. It was a dump. A fourth-floor walk-up, barely any heat, horsehair insulation in the walls, but the windows faced north, flooding the apartment with golden light.

Columbia Journal hosted a virtual panel of industry experts to discuss the intricacies of writing, editing and publishing. The two-hour conversation sought to provide answers to the big question of the day: how do editors choose what to publish?

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.

We grow up thinking love is effortless, or at least I did – that you find someone, you just “know,” and then you trail off towards a sunset that is the rest of your life. We see it in movies, in perfectly arced stories with happy endings, but out here, in the real world, love is rarely a straight shot to paradise. In fact, what is most ironic about the Happy Ending trope is how the story cuts off before we see the bumpy, nauseating cycle of push and pull that so often exists after two people have decided they love each other.