The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2024 Online Contest will accept submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation from February 21 through March 20, 2024.

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2024 Online Contest will accept submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation from February 21 through March 6, 2024.

Besides the fact that I happened to be living in one of them, all the houses looked exactly the same: blue clapboard and white vinyl trim stippled to look like real wood. Houses with landlines and hot tub hookups and no hot tubs attached. Horseshoe-shaped driveways, single acre lots. Idyllic little prefab Kennedy compounds. Pretty much the entire development had been deserted since Labor Day, which was when I’d arrived on the scene, still tan from the final summer of what I’d already begun to think of as my Old Life.

“Talk the fire out” is what they called it. In that small place of green crops and clapboard churches, it was a power kept among washed-in-The-Blood types. A kind of faith-healing passed down from one family member to another. I heard tell of a man who melted his hand with fireworks; it healed in a few days with no scar. A woman who spilled hot grease on her leg but the blisters faded without a lick of pain. I’d never seen it done, but we all knew about this power.

A still life of a glass a lemon-squeezer half / a lemon and a little pot with drinking straws / and the light, so Picasso described one / of his paintings in a letter.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2023 Online Contest, which was judged by Jackie Ess, Haley Mlotek, and Natalie Shapero. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

At twenty-three, I already know that I am going to outlive every man I fuck. I am going to outlive my mother and my father. I am going to outlive my sisters. Both of them. The older and the younger one. I am going to outlive the gray squirrel on the pine tree outside my apartment window as well as the mailman who delivers my Amazon package of Certain Dri fragrance-free solid deodorant. So far, I have already outlived each of my childhood pets. I have outlived one set of my grandparents. I have outlived friends. I have attended one candlelight vigil in the foothills and another in the neighborhood park. I have definitely outlived my virginity.

One day the piano in the hallway of our apartment in Berlin began to tease me. I wanted to touch it but I didn’t know how. I had stayed away from black and white keys until this point, the phase in life when you start to regret the chances you have missed more than the mistakes you have made. The next day I asked Konrad, my son’s piano teacher, if he would teach me, too. He shrugged and I took it as a yes.

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2021 Winter Contest is now officially open for submissions in art, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. Our judges this year are Arthur Lewis (art), Danielle Evans (fiction), Pamela Sneed (nonfiction), Harmony Holiday (poetry), and Wangui Wa Goro (translation).

1. Mise en scène: Sometimes in your bed, but mostly ours is a love in exteriors, in undesirable spaces where we overlay ourselves and make like nest-bodies for one another. Maybe, we would stay out more–if we felt more held.

I

Circa 1960

Alor Star, Malaysia

3pm. Mama’s frying peanuts for the party tonight. Plates of handmade spring rolls line up, waiting for the sizzling peanuts to be done. When Mama’s not looking, I dip my finger into the bright red rose syrup sitting in the pot to cool by the window. Delicious. Heady. Not that anyone’s going to notice the color on my finger in the dark when Papa turns down the lights and the dancing begins. Papa loves to dance.

No one in our leafy suburb had ever seen anything like the yurt. When I was seven and Sachi was ten, Dad built Sachi her “reading yurt” in our backyard. It was fifteen feet tall with a white cone roof. He hung shiny stars and planets from its inner lattice rafters. Mom said she didn’t mind the yurt, but she missed looking out back into the uninterrupted horizon of towering trees.

Alice wondered if Marianne would connect the dots. She did. In about three minutes. “Wait. What’s the name of the ship?”

“The Sea Lyric,” Alice said.

“Wasn’t that the name of the first ship?”

Marianne meant the name of the ship Alice had taken for her first honeymoon, about one year ago.

“Yes,” Alice said. “Same one.”

Jessica puts her fingers all the way inside me like she is reaching up to hold my guts. I’m laying sideways on the bed with my underwear around my ankles, trying to stay cool about this. Her nails are sparkly and manicured to perfect points, like diamonds cut rough at the tip of her fingers.

My mother used to read to me when I was little, mostly at bedtime but sometimes in the afternoons on the couch. My favorite thing was climbing up into her lap with a book. Back then, she was always above me. She’d take the book I’d come with and hold it out in front of us. I remember the way the light came in from the balcony. With her arms around me, it felt as if I was wearing the warmth of her body, as if her beautiful face above me was mine.