There was the sea, we had finally arrived
at its beach covered in rushes, so much wind
where we stood, we watched a sea eagle

I love Alfred Corn’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s “The Poet’s Task” from Spanish to English, which was published in the twelfth issue of Columbia Journal in 1987.

“The nosy neighbor is not an urban figure,” insists author Fran Lebowitz in Public Speaking, the 2010 documentary about her life directed by Martin Scorsese. I recalled this riff as I read “Children with Hangovers,” a short story by Jonathan Lethem originally published in the fortieth issue of Columbia Journal (October 2004).

with a man
on the other side of the forest
is to live out the mystery,

In 1994, Columbia Journal published an early rendition of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red before the piece found its form as a novel-in-verse and was published four years later by Alfred A. Knopf with great praise. This story provides an invaluable window into Carson’s process. As a writer and a fairly indecisive one at that, I’m fascinated by where stories begin—as little specks in a writer’s mind to be swept together and arranged into coherence on the page—and where stories end up, often a distance away from their starting points.

One amazing thing about poetry is that it doesn’t have to make sense. Many of us spend our days working toward clarity, in our communications with one another, in our work, and we require it from most things we consume, be it the news or a podcast. Poetry exists in a space outside of this requirement. How liberatory!

One can and dare do with moncy (+) what one dare not, cannot do sexually (-). With goods, the "thing-in-itself" (+), the seen and unseen, one can evaluate a relationship; a calculation (-) by itself is not the end

I’ve always been tickled pink by the thought of séances. To call back the dead and learn what they have to tell us: what a marvelous thing, and what a frightening one. I’ve never participated in a séance, and I’m not really planning to: but it has been very funny seeing memes over the past (almost) two years proclaiming that Zoom meetings are our era’s séances.

In a few weeks, I will return to my childhood home for Thanksgiving. It will be the first time in years. The holiday is, despite its colonial underpinnings, a favorite of mine largely because I can’t think of another day when anyone can get away with having four to six kinds of pie for dessert. Still, this year, I have an inexplicable knot in my stomach whenever I consider my imminent return.

We were from here, but also from elsewhere. We are the lost children and the dead women. God does not exist—we are proof of that—and down here we always wear a smile.

The rains come in the afternoon when the clouds clot like blood, flowing against one another, thunderheads swelling over the town in the heart of the forest. Men, jockeyed by adrenaline, yank out barrels to collect what is coming, cover sharp corners with blankets, drag mattresses over rocks and jagged edges and concrete. A shudder passes through their rugged bodies, a frenzied burst of voltage; they are used to the droughts, twelve months stretching, a muscle before it snaps, but they are slick with sweat today, running tongues over flaky lips. Always watching the sky, pacing in front of trucks or porches or front doors, places into which they can duck.

As much of pop culture has been reminding us for a while now, fairy tales are quite a bit more irksome than Disney would have us suppose. And it is right that it be so. Disney’s The Little Mermaid remains an excellent piece of entertainment. But there’s something deeper and more moving in the original story’s tragic ending. Disney’s Cinderella is still enchanting; but when the Grimms’ wicked stepsisters’ eyes are pecked out by doves, there’s a satisfaction that is more than malice. Fairy tales ought to be ghastly: they are our myths, and no one likes an insipid demigod. And what better time to value one’s thirst for the gory than at the season of Halloween? (Or Hallowe’en, if you like.)

Necromancy is an art we participate in every time we hear Kurt Cobain’s guitar, the emotive neo-jazz drone of Amy Winehouse’s voice, the romantic surrender of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s “Como La Flor.” It is equal parts disrespect and tribute to not let the dead rest by continuing to immortalize them in art. It’s a complicated remembrance, one that raises questions about who we are in the living world, about why we love what we love, why we sing the songs we sing, why we remember who we remember.

Serpent is in coffee
see how its steams
slithers awakening

Second floor, at the other end of the hall, second door to the left past the stairs. A small attic room with white- and yellow-striped wall paper. On the floor, rust-colored wall-to-wall carpeting; in a corner, a chair with the hole in its woven seat covered by a dark yellow cushion; a school desk; on a cherry wood dresser, a mirror and a candle holder. Behind metal blinds, the transom looks out on the big linden tree at the entrance to the garden, reminding me to have it pruned before the sap rises. Sarah is sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in jean shorts and a black tank top that reveals her tattoos.

How would you end the sentence “2021 was the year of . . .”? Depending on the lens with which you want to retrospectively view the last ten months, you can talk about the state of the planet’s climate, domestic and international politics, the Summer Olympics, or Korean TV shows. Of the many superlatives we can ascribe to this year, the one that I find most intriguing: the year of commercial space travel.

After I got kicked out of camp, my mom wanted me to learn the ways of Man, so I moved in with my dad.

You’re not having a good time with things, are you? No, you’re not doing well at all. And it’s going to get worse before the day’s out. You’re nine, maybe ten, and this has been happening all the days you remember. At least, all the days counting the years from when you started at this school until now. What’s that: three? four? That’s the time we’re looking at here, and that seems right. Three, going on four. It seems nothing of consequence should be happening now, these being your elementary years, but we both know that’s not the case. It certainly doesn’t feel that way to you, right? Not with the dark ribbon of blue-black bruise wrapped around your leg. Or maybe it’s on your arm. You’ve had them there, too, so you know the life of a bruise. The way it starts red, inflamed, a welt, before it fades to this, a Rorschach blot you stare at in the privacy of your bathroom at home, after which it transmutes to a dull yellow-brown like the skin of a fruit, a banana, and you’ve been called that, too—a fruit, though you’re not sure you understand what a fruit is. You just know you’re different, quiet, introspective. You’d like to be left alone, but your introspection marks you out, makes you a target.

after Alejandra Pizarnik (1936 –1972), Forugh Farrokhzad (1934 – 1967), Sylvia Plath (1932 –1963) & Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 – 1982)

“Our silver is also called the White Bride, lying on the bed. Together with her husband, the Crimson King, who rises from the coffin, they enter Mary’s bath, in which through primeval Dampness they will conceive a Son, who will surpass his parents in all things. Look, here the Father upon his throne devours his Son and profusely sweats, to which sweat the Ancients had given the term …”