I am two things: a prince and a little man. No one believes me when I say that I’m a prince. I notice that because they start grinning or flat out tell me I’m not. One boy asked me where my palace was.

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.

In the Iron Mountain maternity ward, eight hundred miles north of Graceland, a nurse repeated what the radio said: “Elvis is dead.” B was born, black strands slicked to his head.

What's the point of heading south—My dead friends:
Rafael Pérez Estrada, Vicente Núñez, Rafael Medina...; Pablo Garcia Baena and Jose de Miguel
have returned to their native Córdoba, nothing is the same

Sally Rooney is back and for sale. Her third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You, came out yesterday at the peak of a marketing campaign that seems to be more focused on distributing swag and “experiences” than getting books into hands. For an author who once said “I am very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities…almost like accessories which people can fill their homes with,” it is hard not to wonder if Rooney is living through her own personal apocalypse as bright yellow Beautiful World bucket hats are sent out to celebrities for photo ops.

Light break detected, radiating
erratic likeness meant as morning, or
the saying of it, new day, this simple acceptance

Here, we mee we sprawl
East to Kyoto to home
once we pass this gate.

Not the one that is gone
Perhaps the one coming
And as dreams burst seams

all writing is isn’t it
a game
of disappearances

I was small.
It would’ve taken my entire life
to traverse the days dividing us.

Near the end of the hours, the background is the yellow forest of the painting; a day on which deer, and all else that is born and will one day die, are bound by an impossible connection. Two days prior, they learn how to pray: if what crowns the sky is a root, then I believe. Two days later, they sit in the sun, in a frame of white light, where the idea of the sky lies beneath their feet.

My friend Cassidy has a new boyfriend and I’m very happy for her, because I love to be happy for people. Except, of course, for my enemies, whom I love to hate. I don’t actively tend to these grudges all the time, just once or twice a week, like my houseplants. Just enough to keep them alive. Just enough to burn some calories. I’m not even jealous that she’s sharing her love with someone else because who would want to be the sole recipient of someone’s love anyway? It would be so much work.

To become a boy was not so expensive
When disrobing, my lover did not gaze with pleasure at the slight curve of my hip
When fucking, I did not float to the walls and watch from afar

In that deep place when you were my root since I was soft newly-tilled earth
I can remember you well.
From the place where you took

Pierre is short, almost squat, with thick ropey legs that remind Mike of a WWE wrestler, one who uses their thighs to choke the shit out of people. Mike is short himself, brushing against 5′3″ when he puts his thick-soled loafers on. Pierre has a raspy-whisper voice, and Mike thinks it’s all those Pall Malls he smokes, one after the other, piling up in his ceramic ashtray on the coffee table. Over dinner, Pierre tells Mike that he used to own lovebirds, but the cigarettes kept killing them, so he decided he better stop. His cats seem to handle it better.

Plato talks
about his hands,
how good, so virtual,

I was dead, or, at the very least, considered dead in the eyes of my country. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Saint Petersburg came down along with it. My mother drank most days until she could no longer see, and in the wake of her biting neglect, I was left a wounded animal. When I was eight years old, a stranger came to the apartment and told me I was going to be an orphan for the rest of my life. As we drove away from my mother’s apartment, I quietly watched the back of the stranger’s head with bewildered eyes.

Lists make the world into something
graspable
solitude

The first issue of the Columbia Journal was published in the fall of 1977 by the students of the Columbia University School of the Arts Graduate Writing Program. It was sixty-seven pages long and featured poetry and fiction, including works in translation, as well as an interview with poet Stanely Kunitz. “It’s a rather ambiguous period,” Kunitz said of the prevailing mood of the time. “One of disenchantment and cynicism, distrust of elders, distrust of the social order, but no flag to wave, and very little idealism.”

“I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
– Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (Translated by Erdağ M. Göknar)