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

“Feeding the Birds,” by Margaret Hetherman, is the winner of the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

Nearly three decades after her mother’s death, Pulitzer prize winner and twice-appointed Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey accepted a faculty position in the city where her mother had been killed. Her return to Atlanta, Georgia set in motion the striking, nonlinear journey of this book—the past and future of the day her mother had been shot by her ex-husband, Trethewey’s step-dad—in her own apartment on Memorial Drive.

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.

Kate Sullivan, Social Media Manager for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Lynn Steger Strong to discuss her second novel Want, a book that explores the complexities of motherhood, lost friendship, and the ways in which we live in, and in spite of, broken systems. The protagonist grapples with precarity amidst an aggregation of desires, while Steger Strong’s prose reminds us of language’s limits and the many voids it creates.

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

What women do with their body is something that should rarely, if ever, be in the hands of anyone besides the woman in question. And yet, it continues to be a political debate in today’s supposedly modern world. In Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Blue Ticket, she takes the reader through a dystopian society in which women have “freedom,” except when it comes to one thing: the ability to have children. Through seven parts, reading like concise poetic vignettes, Mackintosh examines the nature of rebellion, the innate strength of motherhood, and the paradox of choice.

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?

My rubber plant is only six years younger than me. It was purchased at a farmer’s market in my childhood, a kitchen counter plant that quickly outgrew successive pots and has traveled with us around the tri-state area as my parents sought the perfect home for their impending retirement.

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).

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.

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.

When she came back from Tokyo for the first time, she was famous, she was twelve and she didn’t recognize her own apartment.

They are click-bait beautiful, my boyfriend and his other girl. Movie star innocence: his blue eyes, her yellow hair. On loop, I watch them dance in the school gymnasium, gold light sloshing at their ankles. How he smiles when she trips, tottering like a doe in her shiny stilettos. How she falls into him like rain, their mouths pressed together in osmosis. The video—sent to me at midnight, the ring of the notification unbearable—illuminates the bleached square of my bedroom, my face cleansed by the blue screen.

Madeline Garfinkle, Columns Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Hilary Leichter to discuss her new book, Temporary, a debut novel that addresses the paradox of work-life balance and what we sacrifice of ourselves for a career. The unnamed narrator, who is a designated Temp, sifts through a series of jobs which include working on a pirate ship, filling in for an endangered species, serving alongside a murderer, and acting as a boy’s mother, just to name a few. The novel brings forth essential questions about the value of work, time, and how life can slip through our fingers.

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.