After four days of fever, I want to unzip my skin, abandon this body too ripe with sickness and strange. I feel wind-dropped and boozy, but I force myself toward useful action. Tonight, I will cook dinner, the way a good wife and mother should. Poor inferma, my husband says, we can get take out, but I will not be deterred. Go rest, you’ll feel better. No.

“Lapse,” by Anna Foran, is an honorable mention for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

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.

“Who in their right mind uses a credit card to buy thousands of toy cars? It ruined our trip to England.” Laura turned to April, waiting for her to ask questions to keep the story going.

My German companion and I sing as we walk. She’s into the Backstreet Boys; I go for Fats Domino.

“empty beautified,” by Zanib Naeem, is an honorable mention for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

“‘You tired, runner girl?’ They all call me runner girl,” confesses the narrator in the opening of Lynn Steger Strong’s second novel, Want. Having lived a former life as a competitive distance runner, this immediately brought me back to my college locker room, where we had a poster of Lauren Fleshman, runner-writer extraordinaire, standing on an empty track with her arms crossed. “Objectify me,” the poster read. “Look at me, study me, and understand me. Then, and only then, can you make my running shoes. Don’t give me small, pink versions of a man’s running shoes. I’m not a small, pink version of a man.” I looked at this poster every time I left the locker room.

Are you having difficulty getting started? Experiencing frequent urges to go? Has your prostate ballooned to proportions that defy the laws of medical science?

After “Elegy with Sympathy” by Emily Skaja

“Fall,” by Enid Smith Becker, is a runner-up for the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

The week before Christmas, an Italian guy from the Internet scoops you from your white house in a red car. You climb in and fold your hands over your legs, wishing they were bare so you could feel the warmth of your skin. It is cold, though people keep saying that winter here doesn’t begin until the solstice.

To read Clerk of the Dead as a collection about death is to see these poems through a single lens that doesn’t take into account the many facets glimmering in the text. Death is merely a specter haunting the lines, much as Death’s specter haunts us, especially as COVID-19 continues to ravage the nation. Alan Perry’s poems do not only reckon with death or dying; they reckon with what it means to lose something.

The Juice was loose in California the day Pressure got his brain fried.

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

“Social Distancing,” by Stanley Siegel, was named runner up of the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness.”

By giving it away. When I first learned that the line was not my lover’s—that it was, instead, a Narcotics Anonymous platitude which I might have as easily read on a proselytic tee shirt—I was, I admit, let down. When we’d first met, he claimed to be a poet: a self-conscious one, anyway, and a bad one; and it was for that reason, he’d told me, that he never shared his work. Since we’d been teenagers—me, a young fourteen; him, an old seventeen—he had been stashing his writing away as if it were its own kind of felony, as if he meant to insulate me from some further poison. Call it 2012. His Rottweiler whining at my knee. When I first read those words in his hand, in the chicken-scratched letter telling me he meant to get clean, I was all but overcome with an urge to assure him that he wasn’t dirty. When I found, rifling through his drawers after the third overdose—call it 2015—the pamphlet from which he’d excised them, an otherwise bland and featureless, anonymous phrasebook for the prodigal junkie, I kept it. Not because I saw in it anything that might help me, but because there among its occasional underscores and sparse marginalia I thought I could intuit his shadow. Not so much a ghost, nothing half-animate winking in and out of my peripheral vision, but a shadow, static. Something of him—if not original and true to his interior, a close facsimile at least—at last pinned down. I had found no papers in his desk but our rolling papers. There was no secret book of poems, no journal, no literary debris, no accumulated backlog of holiday cards, not one of my own belabored and overzealous love letters—only that thin, lonely book. Call it a relic, an artifact; call me his archaeologist. My first lover, my subcutaneous lover, my subterranean lover, my lover in the dirt—my lover to whom that book would also offer little help.

There are few novels that can claw their way into my cold, easily distracted heart, but Pizza Girl waltzed right in. Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel is, in a word, artful. It is an entertaining exploration of a meandering mind and dives into the rich, layered internal life of someone who claims to not know themself. And it is truly worth your time.

I read a story by Lydia Davis about a woman who, upon turning sixty, began sprouting hair from her ears. Not an outrageous amount of hair—just little tufts at the earholes and along the edges of the lobes. But it was enough hair for her husband to notice and to feel repulsed. He liked a clean look on a woman—no facial hair, or armpit, or legs. Davis didn’t mention the pubic area—it wasn’t a story about that generation.

Names are incantations, and mine is no exception.

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