June 24th. —The architect came back. I think of his blueprints. One afternoon I read through the boss’s copy: a true book. Everything is there.

In my family group chat, we’ve taken a break from sending each other memes and other funny pictures. It started with a text from my mom, expressing her anxiety about the ever climbing far-right voting rate in France. She lives in a rural area, and most villages around her massively voted for Marine Le Pen, an Islamophobic, conservative presidential candidate.

On April 22, 1995, the highly-regarded American poet Jane Kenyon died. Accordingly, Columbia Journal dedicated a portion of its Spring 1996 issue to her memory. This homage included two poems by another highly-regarded American poet, Sharon Olds. The second of those two poems was written for Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, who was also a highly-regarded poet. And Olds’ poem “Love” is a great piece of work, and a fitting tribute to these poet-inspirations.

We're his // Retired slut on food stamps // Forever
Sniffing horse tranquilizer // Seeing digital dreams

My initial reaction to Tracy K. Smith’s “Seventy Times Seven” was one of awe. To begin at the beginning, the title cannot help but remind one of Matthew 18:22. While Smith incorporates religious figures, including San Nicolas, the poem is nothing short of magical in its exploration of culture, spiritual awakening, and human emotions. In a lecture, Smith discussed the interconnections between faith and poetry. She said, “Like the language of spiritual awakening, poems seek to be living words—vehicles for transmitting a sense of the strange and the powerful from speaker to reader” (Smith, 2018). Thus poetry is a vessel that carries with it the energy and intentions set by the author.

I am no stranger to picking apples out of men's throats.
Atlanta
I'm tired of making amends with soon-to-be strangers.
Tired of being my mother's favorite stranger.

“I am tired of women who are sad. I am tired of / Men who are tired.” The end of April is a good time to be finished with feeling sad and tired. It’s springtime; the earth is singing; it’s still National Poetry Month. I’ve never seen the Thames, but I know it mythically, as all rivers are known.

you grab the end of your girlfriend’s scarf and quickly sniff it
when she’s not at the table
I pick off the strands of hair caught on her coat when we go out

i will go to sleep once
my hair is wrapped
with the pterodactyl clips

The fiery rays of the summer sun
are scorching the earth.
The withered prairie, in its slow death throes,

Undisputedly, the years have been at once kind and brutal to Ocean Vuong. I say kind in the sense that, from a career perspective, Vuong has ascended to the peak of literary prominence at a pace and to heights few contemporary poets can match. Along the way up, he’s accrued a faithful audience, struck late-night talk-show stardom, and garnered prestigious awards, a T.S. Eliot Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, among countless others. But I also say brutal, in that violence and loss continue to plague Vuong’s life: he’s had to contend with the harsh realities of growing up in poverty, as an immigrant and former refugee from Vietnam, and as a bookish queer boy navigating through a largely unsympathetic society.

Upon stumbling across this work by Polish poet Leszek Szaruga, translated by the esteemed W.D. Snodgrass and published in our journal in 1995, I felt compelled to keep my own eyelids wide open to read it over and over again. There’s something in the way Szaruga chronicles the attempts of these two “unknown guys” to come to terms with their existence in the world that struck me down, completely unexpectedly so. His short, precise, colloquial language doesn’t rely on big, fancy words; its honesty alone is overwhelming.

I am that boy sneaking around corners of the old Brewery.

In the first picture my father's hands ain't holding nothing

The statue's red lips
drip with the spit
of abandoned wives.

You talk of time and how its crooked ways will make us old as time. of daily devotions. of the goodness in good friday.

You asked me what I knew about thermals—
heat’s tendency to rise, cool, fall again and so
I showed you how to recognize the circle

transcendentally stoned song off a balcony
hand through his hair as it falls on the floor
panting on my back said “holes aren’t longing

Fastened to keys and thieves in its fate
Just as life is fastened to the bright and degenerate,
To forgiveness or silence.

This past week, many of my waking thoughts have strayed towards Ukraine, as I am sure is true for many. Between fear of nuclear threats from Russia, the danger of totalitarianism in Europe, and moving portraits of everyday citizens taking up arms, international consciousness is riveted to this disturbing development.