My mother wants to sell me oils. The oils smell like fresh-cut flowers and citrus fruits and the fishbowl stench of a house that’s been left unoccupied for several months. […]

I had a job over the summer, not because of financial necessity but because my mother held an unshakable belief in the virtue of work. She said that I needed […]

Don’t look at me I am new and born today Dreaming has changed me The night has Melted off all my influences I saw the big sky turn over twice […]

In Madame Bovary, Emma’s desire comes from the novels she reads. These novels are so full of fantasy that they lead her to a life that bucks the status quo […]

The King Must Die I do not trust the strength of our gods in the most fertile land I have seen people shredding each other apart our body bursts out […]

Hurricane seasons are like children, so you micromanage your first with a dizzying array of safeguarding steps. As you nail plywood to your windows, fill every container you have with […]

The diagrams below are excerpted from Emmalea Russo’s new book of poetry, Confetti (Hyperidean Press, 2022). Confetti begins and ends with ecstatic sunrises/sunsets in the 1970s, opening with The Texas […]

be my talismanic property be my new prize for wanting the narcissism of this hot world cut loose like a blimp I came to revirginize my willpower, a white light […]

It is within reach, what I need most; creative time alone. That is, no co-educational tits occupying the airspace above my shoulder as I labor to paint them, pink as […]

There was a horse I met, his name was the thought of a tree. I saw him in the backdrop of darkness in my mind, and on a farm, and […]

Here is a world, black and body, a mother who is protected and timeless, a father who is her husband and stays. a midwife with hands worth more than a […]

At twenty-three, I already know that I am going to outlive every man I fuck. I am going to outlive my mother and my father. I am going to outlive my sisters. Both of them. The older and the younger one. I am going to outlive the gray squirrel on the pine tree outside my apartment window as well as the mailman who delivers my Amazon package of Certain Dri fragrance-free solid deodorant. So far, I have already outlived each of my childhood pets. I have outlived one set of my grandparents. I have outlived friends. I have attended one candlelight vigil in the foothills and another in the neighborhood park. I have definitely outlived my virginity.

One day the piano in the hallway of our apartment in Berlin began to tease me. I wanted to touch it but I didn’t know how. I had stayed away from black and white keys until this point, the phase in life when you start to regret the chances you have missed more than the mistakes you have made. The next day I asked Konrad, my son’s piano teacher, if he would teach me, too. He shrugged and I took it as a yes.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Spring Contest, which was judged by Garielle Lutz, Aaron Coleman, Colleen Kinder, and Natasha Rao. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our four wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

We found a body in the bathroom. It wasn’t wearing any underwear, it wasn’t wearing any clothing at all. The body was wet, face down; its arm was twisted, with the palm of its hand toward the ceiling. We could hear the shower running from the moment we entered the bedroom, or maybe even before that, from the moment we opened the apartment door using the key the building super kept on hand for emergencies. Maybe that body was in the habit of showering with the door open. Maybe it didn’t manage to close the door, or it wanted to leave the water running while walking around naked. Who knows. Here I could skip to the part where later in the hospital they told us that the body had high blood pressure, that it had suffered a heart attack, which could have been avoided if it had taken care of itself. But some memories surfaced between the bathroom and the hospital that I don’t want to gloss over.

From the window of a prison in another province,
a view of autumn clouds.
My interviews did not go well. Some prisoners spoke
obscure dialects, languages from a different planet.

The way the letter “r” rumbles
from the cavern of his throat
through the top of his teeth, gently,

a new being is reborn
with skin as soft as the mouth of a spring
the camouflaging of his broken pride begin

London was a queer place, but, Bristol was queerer.

To get the eel bait, we had to take an old rowboat out to a motorboat. I had never gone fishing before. I have been afraid of eels ever since, at the age of seven, I saw one in an airport fish tank and learned from the accompanying sign that their blood is poisonous to humans. Even the name of the fish disgusts me, the yowl the word entails, the scream of it.