By Jane Marchant

The taxi’s side mirror reflects the driver’s lit cigarette as he maneuvers through the night’s warm exhaust, dust, and sand. Yellow streetlights illuminate the concrete buildings and air conditioners flashing by. After checking into my hostel, I climb into a rickety bunk bed graffitied by past travelers. I am nervous. I am the only guest in the five-story building down a back alley off an alley somewhere in the haze of a city whose language I can neither read nor speak.

By Alex Wexelman

Rivera wrote on her official website, “Growing up, I was steeped in the oral tradition,” the inflection evident in her confident prosody. 

By Saúl Hernández

I lick every drop of sperm off a white man"s navel, / put my lips on his shaft, / his hand grips the back of my neck, / I open my mouth to swallow again, / Tell me something in Spanish. / Sound of my slob in the air, / Tell me something / in Spanish, Tell me / something in Spanish, / Tell me something / in Spanish. /That’s how English asphyxiates me.

By Aura Christi, translated by Gabi Reigh

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
The pleasant tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
A white vulture splits the window
And its wax shadow tips
The whole house skywards.

New work from Brooklyn-based painter Clara Curbera.

By Alex Wexelman

In 1982, Eavan Boland wrote an essay titled “On Religion and Poetry” for The Furrow, a monthly journal for the contemporary Church. Eleven years later, The Columbia Journal reprinted the tract in its No. 18/19 issue.

By Madeleine Voge

I was never chosen to be the naptime fairy, the one who tiptoed around the classroom and waved a wand with bells on the end of it because instead of curling up and closing my eager eyes, I stacked blocks and whispered with Brooks, the boy with long eyelashes who was allergic to bees.

By Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy

Dr. Dutka, who knew nineteen languages
(and with dialects, spoke twenty-four),
reflected the entire world, like an ancient mirror,
and sued his grandchildren for apartment space.

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.

By Alex Wexelman

The first piece in the debut issue of Columbia Journal features three female poets quizzing the recently retired United States Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz, who lived to be 100, was a teacher, a poet, and a gardener of great repute.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

A still life of a glass a lemon-squeezer half / a lemon and a little pot with drinking straws / and the light, so Picasso described one / of his paintings in a letter.

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.

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.

Poetry and terror are so interwoven, it is impossible to extricate one without disturbing the other. They run into each other, borderless and pervasive, like music, or scent.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs actualizes how marine mammals survive and how they die in a capitalistic society as one in the same with Black survival and death. This might sound conspiratorial—because it is. Yet this book truly is a scientific guide on marine mammals.