The Juice was loose in California the day Pressure got his brain fried.

my aunt says her husband
was reincarnated
as a frog, that he floats

“Social Distancing,” by Stanley Siegel, was named runner up of the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness.”

By giving it away. When I first learned that the line was not my lover’s—that it was, instead, a Narcotics Anonymous platitude which I might have as easily read on a proselytic tee shirt—I was, I admit, let down. When we’d first met, he claimed to be a poet: a self-conscious one, anyway, and a bad one; and it was for that reason, he’d told me, that he never shared his work. Since we’d been teenagers—me, a young fourteen; him, an old seventeen—he had been stashing his writing away as if it were its own kind of felony, as if he meant to insulate me from some further poison. Call it 2012. His Rottweiler whining at my knee. When I first read those words in his hand, in the chicken-scratched letter telling me he meant to get clean, I was all but overcome with an urge to assure him that he wasn’t dirty. When I found, rifling through his drawers after the third overdose—call it 2015—the pamphlet from which he’d excised them, an otherwise bland and featureless, anonymous phrasebook for the prodigal junkie, I kept it. Not because I saw in it anything that might help me, but because there among its occasional underscores and sparse marginalia I thought I could intuit his shadow. Not so much a ghost, nothing half-animate winking in and out of my peripheral vision, but a shadow, static. Something of him—if not original and true to his interior, a close facsimile at least—at last pinned down. I had found no papers in his desk but our rolling papers. There was no secret book of poems, no journal, no literary debris, no accumulated backlog of holiday cards, not one of my own belabored and overzealous love letters—only that thin, lonely book. Call it a relic, an artifact; call me his archaeologist. My first lover, my subcutaneous lover, my subterranean lover, my lover in the dirt—my lover to whom that book would also offer little help.

There are few novels that can claw their way into my cold, easily distracted heart, but Pizza Girl waltzed right in. Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel is, in a word, artful. It is an entertaining exploration of a meandering mind and dives into the rich, layered internal life of someone who claims to not know themself. And it is truly worth your time.

I read a story by Lydia Davis about a woman who, upon turning sixty, began sprouting hair from her ears. Not an outrageous amount of hair—just little tufts at the earholes and along the edges of the lobes. But it was enough hair for her husband to notice and to feel repulsed. He liked a clean look on a woman—no facial hair, or armpit, or legs. Davis didn’t mention the pubic area—it wasn’t a story about that generation.

Names are incantations, and mine is no exception.

The skin on my shoulders peels.
Slack and careless, I was out all
afternoon in a meadow. Ever cannot

Obviously, the word is state. As in
of emergency
yet a body continues to rattle

“Feeding the Birds,” by Margaret Hetherman, is the winner of the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

Nearly three decades after her mother’s death, Pulitzer prize winner and twice-appointed Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey accepted a faculty position in the city where her mother had been killed. Her return to Atlanta, Georgia set in motion the striking, nonlinear journey of this book—the past and future of the day her mother had been shot by her ex-husband, Trethewey’s step-dad—in her own apartment on Memorial Drive.

An internet meme is information ballistics. Fast, impactful, and easily weaponized, memes are often esoteric instructions directing ways to perceive and think about the world. When politicized, memes can have propagandistic power over the imagination, especially if there is a message that aligns with one’s own political beliefs.

Kate Sullivan, Social Media Manager for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Lynn Steger Strong to discuss her second novel Want, a book that explores the complexities of motherhood, lost friendship, and the ways in which we live in, and in spite of, broken systems. The protagonist grapples with precarity amidst an aggregation of desires, while Steger Strong’s prose reminds us of language’s limits and the many voids it creates.

i wonder if salmon are aware
of their orange pink flesh inside them.
i looked at the cuts at whole foods yesterday

What women do with their body is something that should rarely, if ever, be in the hands of anyone besides the woman in question. And yet, it continues to be a political debate in today’s supposedly modern world. In Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Blue Ticket, she takes the reader through a dystopian society in which women have “freedom,” except when it comes to one thing: the ability to have children. Through seven parts, reading like concise poetic vignettes, Mackintosh examines the nature of rebellion, the innate strength of motherhood, and the paradox of choice.

My partner thinks I put my desk below the towel rack in my bathroom to hide from my loving parents, but that’s not the whole story. Writing fiction, to my attorney parents, financially literate sisters, and medical student partner, is a bizarre effort. They wonder what facts I work off of. Am I reading into everything they do, how they do it, and why? What does “telling the truth” mean, if mine’s the only voice on the page? My family nervously eyes my laptop and notepad. I imagine they are curious, and insecure. We’ve all been living together for three months, quarantined beneath the same butter-lettuce green rafters. Who, but them, could I be harvesting for material?

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx wrote that while people make history, they do so under conditions not of their choosing. In the United States, I doubt anyone hoping for change would choose today’s conditions if given the option. To name a few: an economic crisis that has left millions unemployed and unable to pay rent, a militarized police force willing to brutalize even the most peaceful protestor, and armed white supremacist vigilantes emboldened by a president whose recommended cure for a global pandemic is to inject Lysol.

“I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.” —Ralph Ellison. We understand art-making as a kind of uprising—an uprising of spirit, an uprising against limits, an uprising of new ways to think about and perceive the world around us. How do we imagine the polity in our art, to paraphrase Robert Hass, and how does that energize our politics?

My rubber plant is only six years younger than me. It was purchased at a farmer’s market in my childhood, a kitchen counter plant that quickly outgrew successive pots and has traveled with us around the tri-state area as my parents sought the perfect home for their impending retirement.

If you’re all worked up about what the now infamous Harper’s Magazine piece of summer 2020, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” is either saying or suggesting about “cancel culture,” then you might be interested to learn that the Supreme Court already ruled on this—sort of—in a notable First Amendment case, U.S. v. Alvarez (2012).