60 for 60: Breath

By Zachary Erickson

I’m Zak, a second-year poetry concentrator and this year’s archivist for the Columbia Journal. In celebration of our sixtieth issue, I will be leading various archival projects, and I’m pleased to kick off “60 for 60,” where we’ll publish sixty of our favorite archival pieces over the course of the year.

What is memory in an immaterial world? Not being a philosopher, I admit that I have no idea. Being a poet, I know that memory is insubstantial and ubiquitous and necessary for (artistic) life: like breath. “Breath,” by Maura Stanton and originally published in our Fall 1978 issue, connects photographed memories with personal, insubstantial, indelible breaths. And we sorely need such ephemeral materiality to enjoy our current transitions: (finally) breathing the same air together. It’s a meditative poem and an excellent way to start a meditative year — a year that will look closely at past, present, and future not least because we are happy to commemorate and interrogate the Journal‘s ongoing legacy.

BREATH

Maura Stanton

Here’s the round puff of happiness,
the graph of a cold, even long
tendrils of sleeping mist captured
riskily with a shaving mirror.
I pin the hundred photographs
detailing my family’s breath
across every wall of my apartment:
At Christmas I call them snowflakes,
my father’s old sigh, a brother’s
cough turned into bright constellations.
My mother’s gasp in the hospital
resembles the air in ice cubes
or the whorls in her cold fingers
examining her daughter’s spine.
Some photographs don’t last:
My family singing “Silent Night”
disappeared into black chemicals,
but the suck of a brother’s mouth
on beer, a sister whistling alone,
such breaths clarify each year,
the way an icicle drips in the sun
growing sharp as it melts away.