Coy best describes Alisson Wood’s relationship with the reader in Being Lolita. Wood cunningly uses the reader’s knowledge so that, at decisive points, they either read with or against the grain of this text. In the preface, Wood narrates her and the teacher’s first kiss. When the teacher kisses the inside of Alisson’s ankle to quell the itch of a mosquito bite, Alisson hadn’t read the novel. At that point, Mr. Nick North, her English teacher, told Alison that the story of Humbert and Lolita is a love story. A reader’s reaction to her admission sets up their relationship with the rest of the memoir. If you know anything about Vladimir Nabokov, you know what Lolita is about.

There was never any question of me leaving. There was no train in the timetable I could take, no car in a garage, not even a bike, and more importantly – now that we’d travelled far enough North – not a single road name on the map that would flag anything in my memory. But that’s not to say I was lost. Our position was always clear; we were a slow-moving pin on the veins of England, and this houseboat that smelled of oiled wood and time, and whose window shutters I’d painted green the day we moved in, was what constituted home now. Its decor of pine-panelled everything was hardly to my taste, but I’d learned to live with it and make my mark with white curtains, houseplants and a sparkling sink. I knew exactly where I was; only the outside kept changing.

The night before I moved from Maryland to California by myself, I went to the ice cream shop with the color changing plastic spoons. I was fourteen. I had always been surrounded by family, having lived in a house with my grandmother, mother, grandfather, brother, and sister.

Romalyn Ante’s debut poetry collection ‘Antiemetic for Homesickness’ illustrates that longing, desire, and need for home. In the poem ‘Memory’, Ante’s speaker uses Tagalog to demonstrate the undeniable claim in longing for a place that is now absent in one’s life. ‘Tahanan means Home, Tahan na means Don’t cry anymore’. Each poem in Romalyn Ante’s book helps navigate the journey in moving from one home and creating another. The poems teeter on the language of two different perspectives, one from birth, which was the Philippines, and one of bombardment that was the United Kingdom, where she now resides. The poems move between English and Tagalog, which speak to Ante’s experience, navigating her own culture and that of the culture she has to present in. There is the Westernized Gaze glaring at Ante, and these poems speak to that fight against assimilation and succumbing to it. Ante’s book also speaks to the people who are left behind in search of a better life. One only has their memories to keep their hope and drive alive to find better opportunities as an immigrant. In the poem, ‘Only Distance’, Ante’s speaker recalls a memory, “When all the stars are out, she returns/ to this tropical wind, to the constellation/ of moles on his shoulder, his second-hand clothes./ He slices mangoes, and lays them on a banana leaf./ She’s with him…”

Tom had picked me up after his soccer game. He was fresh from the shower, his shaggy hair still slightly damp at the edges. He looked so beautiful. It was a Monday evening, three days after we had met. It was the first time we went on a date.

When they enter
my brain the grass
greens past its prime.

In a field, the pollinator dips her instrument into flowers. She is under a white tent almost as large as the field itself—she and the others, all in white from head to toe, with goggles and gloves. The flowers are yellow, black-spotted, and the size of a man’s hand; rows and rows of them unroll into the distance. Eventually, they’ll die, and fruit will come. The fruit isn’t sweet, but bland and filled with seeds and nutrition. She hates it but eats it, like everyone else. No one speaks, though once in a while a throat clears or something electronic beeps or vibrates. Hours go by when she doesn’t think about home, the apartment, her girlfriend. It shouldn’t bother her so much to allow herself to be blank for a while, but she’s bothered.

I am in a mid-sized village in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, studying abroad to learn Spanish. In the middle of my three-week stay, I want to make dinner for my host family. My host mother Doña Margo gives me two options for transforming the gallina into pollo —a sharp twist or a swift and deep slice through the neck. She looks at my hands, reads their inexperience, and tells me to use a knife. The bird is tied by its feet to a branch of the lemon tree, dazed by the rush of blood to its head. The dog knows, waits, eyes fixed on the packed earth beneath the bird.

I once heard there is a pool of loss and each loss adds to it. There’s no differentiating between its objects, especially when there’s no defining what’s been lost. But when it came to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, you knew exactly what was at stake, Grandpa: your family, friends, and country. Your life.

In the early months of the pandemic, an old meme resurfaced on social media: fake plane windows made from household objects – mug handles, washing machine doors, toilet seats – posed in front of a photo of the sky. It had started as a joke about being unable to afford international travel, and became one about being unable to leave the house. The caption: 2020 travel plans be like.

Chen Maoping, known by her pen name Sanmao, was born in 1943 in Chongqing, China. A prolific writer and an ardent traveler, Sanmao lived in Taiwan, the Canary Islands, Central American, and Western Africa. Her life in countries abroad gave birth to over fourteen books, the most well-known of which, Stories of the Sahara, a hybrid of memoir and travelogue, catapulted her into the role of one of the most captivating and enigmatic writers at the time in the Chinese-speaking world.

In the Sonoma dusk, bats swoop above the winding road to our gate and around the garden pond below our bedroom window. I cannot see their faces; only the outline of wings and ears. The bats mostly stay away from me, in their hunt for nighttime insects that cluster in the shadows of the house.

died in 1891 at Tenerife,
on his way from exile.

I’m visiting my son who lives on a boat in a marina in the San Francisco Bay. The movement of the boat is almost imperceptible until I stand outside and it seems like the boat is still and it’s the dock that’s moving. I am so sleepy and although it’s 10 AM I crawl back into bed and pull the fake Sherpa cover over my head. I sob for a moment into the nubby polyester and consider sucking my thumb. I try it but get no satisfaction.

Those familiar with Lindsay Ellis likely came to know of her in the context of media criticism. Her snarky and infinitely meme-worthy video essays covering Disney and The Hobbit, among other topics, draw millions of views on YouTube and netted her a Hugo Award nomination in the process. But behind the scenes, Ellis has been brewing up Axiom’s End, a sci-fi thriller that grapples with timely questions about our civilization while its hero grapples with aliens.

“The Wind Will Not Carry You,” by Jordan Evans, is an honorable mention for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

My neighbor, Willow, lights up when she sees me. Her face explodes into a wide grin, her eyes squinch up, and she ducks her chin into her roly-poly neck. She waddles over, twines her fat fingers into the wire fence, sticks her bare foot through one of the gaps, and wiggles it to say hello since her hands are otherwise occupied. She looks back to her mother, disengages one of her hands to point to a latch, and squeals gay! gay! Gate! Gate! She wants the barrier between us to dissolve.

“No One to Call a Friend,” by Jim Ross, is an honorable mention for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

It’s midnight and I’m still awake, writing by a halo of lamp light. I glance up at my bedroom window and the apartments across the street have vanished into the night. The city is asleep in the gloaming, and I am the last one awake. The world feels gone and lonely, so I go inside my tent.

all the tattered things all the broken things hidden behind a sock stuck in drywall to keep out the cold a hole burrowed to store plunder hold ill-gotten gains stash secrets things crumbling down as hours slog away decomposing things heaped one on top of another on top of another dragged there by vermin into final rest into the thing-graveyard under the thing-night where light never unfolds its rays all the moldering things treasured by rats shiny this bits of stuff shiny shavings bits of that await some final release or re-assemblage amidst damaged things with parts seized up half a child’s toy wound down one last time a nest of silky grey hair pilfered buttons paper clips bottle caps all flung onto the growing thing-mound waiting like skeletons unburied unredeemed unfound should light break through exhume this boneyard-of-things when a cat hungry for prey strikes slashes the rodent’s doorway claws sharpened like shards of stained glass things might be freed blessed open unfettered rescued from their rot