I call a new ENT practice to make an appointment. I’ve been swimming and keep trapping water in my ears. I can barely hear whenever that happens. Earplugs make me stone-deaf. Getting help feels urgent.

Elsa has a problem: she is invisible to everyone. Published by Columbia Journal in 1999, “Elsa Minor” investigates the relationship among mental health, human faith, and absurdism.

The blade, huge,
on which my daily
panic of a face

Tech gadgets, outdoor-grilling gear, and novelty mugs are the gifts that we might expect a son to bestow upon his father. Not so in “World Champion,” a short story by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, translated from Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger and originally published in Columbia Journal’s forty-fourth issue. In this tale, a son honors his father’s 50th birthday with both a “gold-plated navel cleaner” and violent revenge.

I’ve never gone swimming in a river (I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a river considered clean enough to swim in), but I’ll never forget William Blake’s words in “The Chimney Sweeper“: “And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.” I doubt that, in Blake’s lifetime, anyone would have much fancied the Thames as a purificatory bath; but that does not stop the imagination from portraying it thus. I don’t think I can avoid rivers in my poetry, either, whether I’ll ever swim in one or not.

On the stand that collapsed
long before my arrival, I halt
and look to the autumn sun—

Marie Howe’s poem “Late Morning” was published in the Winter 1996-7 issue of Columbia Journal. Spare and uncompromising, the poem meditates upon the moments in which grief finds us, upon the mundane details that harbor such horror: “I remember … crumbs and dishes still / on the table, and a small glass bottle of milk and an open jar of raspberry jam”.

Anne Marie Rooney’s poem “Letter to a Lampshade,” published in Columbia Journal in 2012, is about so much more than light and the material that enfolds it. The lampshade—the object—becomes a tool for the narrator’s profound introspection: “If I were like you, round, / apologetic. If I could seal closed and fall / into a bed wearing only light.” If only, if only…

I want the impossible. Another
genre. Time for opening shots
of gravel, a small brick house

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2022 Spring Contest is now officially open for submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. Our judges this year are Garielle Lutz (fiction), Colleen Kinder (nonfiction), Natasha Rao (poetry), and Aaron Coleman (translation).

I do not know who was singing
Amid beats, strains, and melodies, I was conscious of unrhythmic footfalls
The way Kafka was wary of feet beneath the land of Prague

Recently, one morning at the crack of dawn, I was awoken by what sounded like a wrecking ball coming through my bedroom wall. It was, in fact, not coming through my bedroom wall, but rather the wall of the building next to me—a complete teardown. Apparently it takes more than one collision to destroy a structure of this size, because the sound carried on for hours, and then days, before transforming into other sounds—bulldozers moving brick, jackhammers splitting pavement, drills puncturing pipes—always rising with the sun. It’s a terrible way to start the day, particularly for a person who finds himself in a bad mood even at the best of times.

I came to poetry by way of Pablo Neruda, seeking the poets of my continent for guidance when the Europeans and Americans—the Plaths and Rimbauds and Dantes of the world—encouraged dark thoughts in me. Across the cordillera, off the southernmost tip of America, Neruda’s countryman had been going blind and making waves of his own, away from the odes to the body and the waves that drew me in.

This is how it happened.
You or I got off the bus and met on the street. We held hands until I let yours drop because the sidewalks were crowded or my palm was sweaty or I wanted to hurt you. You tried to take it back, but I adjusted the strap of my bag or combed a loose piece of hair or dug in a pocket.

We make our way through the corners of the grand old building that houses the Buenos Aires Jewish Museum, following the guide—an elegant woman with a friendly smile—and looking at passing displays with old prayer books decorated in mother-of-pearl and gold leaf, a letter from Albert Einstein to the Argentine Jewish community, and even a table set with plastic food and electric candles in imitation of the Shabbat ceremony.

Gertrude Stein said that, “One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.” Poet Donald Revell captures that very feeling—a feeling which became a catalyst for the blazing onset of French Modernism—in his translation of surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Le brasier” in Columbia Journal’s twenty-second issue, from the winter of 1994. I thoroughly enjoy the first two lines of the translation, which Revell ingeniously flipped. “What I adore and transport/ I’ve thrown into the fire” (1-2). Revell makes it more palatable for an English-speaking reader without losing its flair. He does an outstanding job capturing the slant rhymes Apollinaire uses, such as with the rhyme of “testicles” and “vegetables.” At times he gets creative and writes a rhyme where one didn’t exist in the original.

it’s true when I tell you
I don’t know what’s good for my health
like wiping my powdered fingers

Macbeth, to my mind, is a play that shouldn’t work but does. It’s quite clear that, politically, it served to flatter James I’s ego in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. So, we would expect it to be propaganda and nothing more. Yet what we get is an unforgettable work of art, alarming in its intensity; Duncan may rest in peace, but the dagger is still in us when we’ve left the theatre.

Garielle Lutz once called the sentence a lonely place. For Lutz, that lonely sentence is a site of beauty and complexity. She writes conventional stories with musical sentences.

Published only five years ago in 2017 in the Columbia Journal, “Three Incidents of Rain” follows a girl, then a woman, in her journey to comprehend tragedy and love, and the intersection of feeling at both extremes. Told from the ages of eight, thirteen, and twenty-five, the unnamed narrator recollects an early encounter with the morbid curiosity of humanity, revels in the first moments of queer love with a girl who thinks she can fly, and grapples with the sudden loss of her father in an accident. T Kira Madden’s sparse and evocative prose punches holes in itself, through which the reader can peek to intuit the various emotional registers on which each sentence operates. For example, Madden captures the disembodiment of grief as the narrator describes herself speaking to a coworker: “These are the things my mouth is saying.”