I knew that my fatherless happiness wouldn’t last, but I never understood why my mother chose Igor Borisovich over her other suitors. Anyone—anyone at all would have been better. Gena had his own car, Oleg wrote poetry and Misha brought me a doll in a blue satin dress from East Germany. But aside from providing little joys to brighten our 1980s Soviet existence, all those men seemed much kinder than my new stepfather.

When there was nothing else they could do and Dad was discharged, I thanked the doctors with a weak handshake. Then I went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria and stuffed my face with two servings of ravioli with tomato sauce. Mom came down a bit later and ordered a coffee, which she stirred with a spoon for what seemed like an eternity. She drank the coffee cold in a single gulp, and while signaling the waiter for the bill, she asked me to take care of the transfer arrangements. She was beyond handling things.

My mother speaks for me. I nod along as she recounts the twisted history of my illness, too weak to correct her when she trips over a detail. “I’m a doctor,” she declares, and physicians pay heed. They answer her litany of questions, tolerate the shrill panic in her voice. My mother is a medical professional, and this is my golden ticket—the only thing that will save me. I’m one of the lucky ones. Some people wait years, decades, hundreds of thousands of dollars before they arrive at a diagnosis of Lyme Disease. Mine came easy: a week after the pink rashes that colonized my skin, a variant of the classic bull’s eye. Treatment was supposed to last four weeks.

Laura opened the kitchen cupboards and threw pots and pans across the room. She dropped plants into garbage cans. In the living room she pulled drawers and dumped ballpoint pens, electrical cords, and dead batteries onto the floor. She wandered through the rooms examining things, tossing them aside. In the bedroom she opened the closet, where sweaters, T-shirts, pants, skirts, and jeans were packed together on hangers. She tugged at a blouse and all the clothes together flexed toward her and away, as if some great creature, startled to life, had begun to breathe. A shoebox at the corner of the upper shelf caught her attention. Inside, she found the bag.

Tiffany Troy, Translation Assistant Editor for Columbia Journal, spoke with poet and novelist, Joseph Fasano, to discuss world building, archetypes, and craft in A Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020). His debut novel features a man’s obsessive journey into the wilderness to confront his childhood, fatherhood, love, and belonging in the mythos. Fasano is an award-winning poet and the founder of the Poem for You series, an open space where wordsmiths join to recite their favorite poems. Twitter/ Instagram. He teaches at Manhattanville College and Columbia University.

A book. An answer. A person. A moon. Some of mine
Something of mine, mine a rhythm
Rhythm and ritual

Dad, in his white undershirt and gym shorts, asked to speak with me one night. I didn’t think much of this; he often wished me goodnight with an “I love you” and a “sweet dreams” sprinkled in for good measure. But when he entered the bedroom and closed the door behind him, my heart dropped—he never closed the door. I knew what this was about.

On January 24, 2021, Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights hosted an open conversation about the nuts and bolts of translation contract negotiation and the critical importance of finding a community with translators Julia Sanches, and Umair Kazi ’16 (Fiction). Writer, translator, Word Up volunteer and Columbia alumna Daniella Gitlin ’12 (Nonfiction) moderated the event. Kianny Antigua and Dominican Writers Association founder Angela Abreu also participated in the conversation.

Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

Bizarre, long-term disorders
can be harvested in people
I had three, four, or five

We’ve changed. In May, it hadn’t yet happened; in May, we hadn’t come so far. But now we know how we can use the summer: to create good window seats that look out into the garden, which we seldom enter, and then only in rubber boots. And only if we have to reposition the dolls after a night of wind or rain. The largest doll that we could find rests in the hammock. If you look at it through the wrong end of the binoculars, you can deceive yourself well enough. It seems as if a child really is dangling in the net stretched between the red maple (whose leaves are enormous this year of all years!) and the eastern white pine.

koi fish
throbs in the neck
of your lover.

Pamela Sneed remembers her childhood: “Even my era did not allow me to be little innocent / A threat if I spoke up / A competitor for middle class white girls / who had the world handed to them / And resented me/you for surviving / thriving despite all the odds” (Twizzlers), living against the world who put so much on her back. In the memoir/poetry collection, Funeral Diva, Sneed offers us a glimpse into the 1980s to the world we live in now, traveling through time to a place where Black and Brown LGBTQ+ youth were growing up dealing with the AIDS crisis, police brutality, and struggling to keep communities together in spite of it all. Sneed uses her voice to bring space for the Black community, her eyes paint the image of growing up with terror at your front door and learning to absorb it and move forward.

To take responsibility for your life is a middle class concept, I said to Kristina, who was grimly eating a box of Cheez-Its with her arm in a sling and trying to convince me not to go over to KJ’s apartment again.

We are learning metaphors in middle school,
metaphors as a literary device rather than a lesson about life.

Sue William Silverman opens How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences with a road trip in her gold-finned Plymouth, “cruising through life” down Route 17 as a teen, “planning to never stop.” Throughout this memoir/thematically linked essay collection, Silverman shows us that, metaphorically, she is still that restless young woman behind the wheel. Poring over an old atlas, Silverman can trace the places and episodes of her difficult past to map the urgency and central drive of the book: what explains the narrator’s life-long fear and obsession with death, and what does it mean to survive?

Say it was a night, any night in the early ‘60s, and I was falling asleep in our brick rambler on Layton Drive in the sleepy DC suburbs. Corner lot, the two-trunked tree. A basement that, like every basement here, flooded after a hard rain. The collective moan meant everyone on Layton Drive was in the same boat, headed downstairs with our pails. Still, we, the Parks, were different from our neighbors; the only family that ate kimchi, for one thing. Kimchi with tuna boats, kimchi with spaghetti ‘n’ meatballs. I even liked it old and soggy but soon enough my mom would be fitting herself with those yellow Playtex gloves over an impressive mound of chopped cabbage and sliced red radishes topped with cayenne pepper. Translation: new kimchi! Fresh and crunchy, just the way I loved it.

but my husband looks more like our savior:
more like Jesus than the man
they have stained into glass–

In his new collection, The Malevolent Volume, 2018 National Book Award, and Lamba Literary Award Winner, Justin Phillip Reed, delves into the underbelly of identity, poetry, religion, myths through the lens of a queer, Black American. A constant theme of The Malevolent Volume is man transforming into a monster, either classically mythic like a Gorgon, or a newly invented creature. In this collection, Reed accepts and moves deftly through anger, cultural truths, contemporary references, and never turns away.

Brooke Davis, online arts editor at Columbia Journal, spoke with director and filmmaker Tayo Amos about her short films On The Clock and A Blossom in the Night and creation during the pandemic.