The first twenty minutes of the match were niggly, with plenty of elbows in play. There would be purple bruises for the boys to poke at gingerly when they woke to their Sunday morning hangovers. But it wasn’t till Colum got shoved into a graceless tumble that aggression stole a yard on matters. He took a flat hand to the chest from their center forward, a ribbony ginger lad with no manners. Colum slowly two-stepped his way to a fall near the penalty spot. He stayed sitting there for a few beats too long, and I was walking over with my hand out to help him to his feet when I saw the look on his face. Did you ever see a baby who’s taken a bump or been annoyed in a way that’s fresh to them, when they can’t make up their small mind whether to wind up for a bawl or just laugh? The flickering mood on his face set me worrying. Colum’s a large lad and when he falls you’d want him to fall on the right side of the bed, otherwise no one’s having a nice morning. I took my hand away and moved it up to my hair, but he’d already seen it. […]

I have started choking. Kung pao chicken. Rib medallions. Cheap steak. Sometimes I can wait it out, arms up, breathing deep, until the lump is gone. I can finish my meal. Sometimes I vomit. Two fingers. The tongue’s spongy heel. Last night my wife, Grace, woke up the baby to drive the three of us to the emergency room so the nurse could wake up a specialist to use her flexible camera to shove the chicken chunk deeper down my gullet. I was embarrassed and frustrated and hungry.

I already know what I’ll do. If Cedil doesn’t come back by the end of the year, I’ll go to my grandmother’s sitio. I’ll get a heifer, raise its calves, and ride around on my horse. Each day there’ll be plenty to do, and that’s better than hanging around here like a fool, dreaming about the island the rest of my life, remembering the games we used to play there, the things Cedil and Tenisão said, even the times we were terrified, like the day the raft almost sank with the three of us on it.

Christopher Soto doesn’t mince words in his debut collection Diaries of a Terrorist, an eviscerating and urgent work of verse that calls for abolition of the police state. The Salvadoran poet and abolitionist was born, raised, and is currently based in unceded Tongva, Chumash, and Kizh land (Los Angeles, California). Soto has worked for years as a political organizer in various capacities, including co-founding Undocupoets and the national Writers For Migrant Justice campaign. His long-awaited collection sheds a harsh light on police brutality and state violence in the United States and beyond.

And when my fire was lit, I took it by the arms and danced as I shouted Lléguense, mis panas,

Between classes and meetings with students
I find myself
Looking up images of the physical difference

In the end, it’s only the fluttering sound of falling leaves. Starting today, I’ll stop feeling remorseful. Starting today, I’ll stop feeling remorseful about my remorse.

This poem by Jane Miller was originally published in the third-ever issue of Columbia Journal, in 1979. When our wonderful archivist told me I would be selecting the final poem for our 60 for 60 project, I knew I wanted a poem that spoke to some kind of ending, one that evoked an urgency, a hurried farewell.

The poet Paul Celan died in 1970: he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine. In 2011, Columbia Journal featured “The Last Breath of Paul Celan” in its forty-eighth issue. Why publish a meditation forty years in the gestation? Poets never actually die, to their readers. What fellow poet Ryan Flaherty had to say is not irrelevant; and it is beautiful, too.

Published in the 2017 issue of Columbia Journal, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “This Should Explain It” sketches an imperfect mother to an imperfect daughter and spares neither from the harsh light of abjection that has become the hallmark of her work. Here, Moshfegh dredges the well of memory with ample quirkiness, pulling from it a tangle of grief, love, and strangeness that besets a daughter in the wake of her mother’s passing. In short: this should explain it.

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.

To a certain extent, much of 20th-century thought was taken up by argument about religious faith’s relevance or irrelevance, and this affected literature. T.S. Eliot, for example, wrote that poetry needs a religious tradition behind it in order to flourish. As I’m not a theologian—and I also don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions about the present century—I’ll leave that argument to one side. Since I’m a poet, though, I would venture to suggest that a writer runs a terrible risk if attempting to eliminate all non-rational belief from creative work. I would even recommend a healthy respect for superstitions. I don’t mean we should return to burning witches; but I do mean that a world without Halloween or its analogues would be rather boring. At least metaphorically, writing is a kind of magic, and anti-magical poetry would probably be an unsustainable gimmick.

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.

In Justin Taylor’s elegiac short story “No Names,” a narrator reflects on his ephemeral but meaningful connection with a deceased poet. His recollections coalesce around a single evening in which the narrator shared a table with the poet at a neighborhood bar, surrounded by fellow writers with whom they drank, chain-smoked, and chatted about nothing in particular.

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.

It’s an exciting literary event when a translator resurrects a writer from the obscurity of the past. To our benefit, this is exactly what Megan McDowell does with her new translation of Juan Emar’s Yesterday (New Directions, April 2022), a novel whose wonderfully frustrating exploration of the difficulties of communication comes at a time when we are reconceiving our social relationships in a post-pandemic world. As Emar’s first substantial introduction to the American reading public—fifty-eight years after his death—Megan McDowell’s translation pays deft tribute to the levity, complexity, and despair of Emar’s prose, while maintaining the intellectual fortitude of a text that asks us to reconsider fundamental conceptions of identity that undergird both the popular novel and, by extension, our understanding of ourselves.