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Visitors

By Owen Torrey

They always arrived in the morning. If there was snow the night before, that is. That winter, there was. They appeared through the window above the sink on the hill. Slashing upwards in loose diagonals. Often in pairs. Often alone. I was alone.

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One and Done

By Noah Grey Rosenzweig

My boyfriend gets out of the back seat, pulling his phone out of his back pocket as he straightens up, tapping “record” with a slim finger. His voice is steady when he asks me, the phone held between us, “What are we doing today?” I look up at the camera and tilt my head, squinting against the sun and the fear.

“Getting top surgery,” I say.

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Teaching Virginia Woolf

By Carlie Hoffman

It was October. An unseasonably warm day. I know because I was wearing shoes without socks. Near the campus of John F. Kennedy High School, the stray geese crowded on the brown grass by the traffic circle, like groupies as if the honking horns of the cars were a rock band.

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Spring 2023 Online Contest Winner: Personal Reasons

Besides the fact that I happened to be living in one of them, all the houses looked exactly the same: blue clapboard and white vinyl trim stippled to look like real wood. Houses with landlines and hot tub hookups and no hot tubs attached. Horseshoe-shaped driveways, single acre lots. Idyllic little prefab Kennedy compounds. Pretty much the entire development had been deserted since Labor Day, which was when I’d arrived on the scene, still tan from the final summer of what I’d already begun to think of as my Old Life.

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Spring 2023 Online Contest Winner: Talking the Fire Out

“Talk the fire out” is what they called it. In that small place of green crops and clapboard churches, it was a power kept among washed-in-The-Blood types. A kind of faith-healing passed down from one family member to another. I heard tell of a man who melted his hand with fireworks; it healed in a few days with no scar. A woman who spilled hot grease on her leg but the blisters faded without a lick of pain. I’d never seen it done, but we all knew about this power.

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The Winners of the 2023 Online Contest

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2023 Online Contest, which was judged by Jackie Ess, Haley Mlotek, and Natalie Shapero. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

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To The Stars & Other Stories

As one of the early Russian Symbolists of the late nineteenth century Sologub—like his artist in “The Lady in Shackles,” another story in the collection—is of paltry fame but important talent. Better known for his poetry and novels, he’s credited for bringing the cynical and macabre motifs of Western Europe’s fin de siècle to Russian literature.

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NONFICTION, THE LATEST Kristina Tate NONFICTION, THE LATEST Kristina Tate

The Orange Drop

Have you ever watched someone eat an orange and not had the urge to ask, Could I have a piece, please? If you have, then I’m afraid you might be stronger than most / The orange is dined on delicately / She requires care, from start to finish / Even the tearing of her sheath must be done with care or else you sacrifice parts of her fleshy sweetness—first to the rind, then to the compost […]

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Through the Eyes of Winged Things: The Birds and Ghosts of Jess Richards

Jess Richards’ memoir Birds and Ghosts is peppered with pencil sketches of birds—peppered because the specks of bird appear like grains of pepper, coalescing into network structures. Poetry, lyric essay, memoir, prose poetry, occult reflections, and sketches join to form a map, a network, shaped like a brain by connections and synaptic firings.

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NONFICTION, THE LATEST Kristina Tate NONFICTION, THE LATEST Kristina Tate

American Boy

Superman has nothing on my older brother when he’s high on crack. Muscles tensed, jaw clenched, underwear drenched in piss, standing in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up, years before her death and still more before Tommy winds up beaten down in a half-way house for Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA) patients […]

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The Horror of the Ordinary in Emma Cline’s The Guest

The Guest is all about nonattachment. It follows a twenty-two-year-old woman named Alex as she is expunged from the home of Simon, the wealthy older man she has been staying with for the summer. The narrative action clings, as though in real time, to the five days she is left to wander the “wilderness” of Long Island’s East End, until a party on Labour Day, when Alex hopes to re-attach herself to Simon, and the trappings of his rarefied life.

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Capturing Truths: A Conversation with Dina Nayeri 

Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough is Dina Nayeri’s second and latest nonfiction book, released in March. The book balances powerful case studies with the deeply personal as Nayeri analyzes why those who are most vulnerable are often dismissed and disbelieved. It’s a large topic, but she doesn’t stray away from complex ideas and questions such as truth and facts. Instead, she makes them digestible for the reader and expands our worldviews while folding us into that long, slow work of believing.

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