You shouldn’t be here, but inside your head you’ve already escaped, that’s what you tell the other inmates, but they just snicker like they’ve heard that before, so you tell the concrete wall that the cops arrested the wrong girl and you just happened to be at the same party, a little fucked up but basically in control, dancing to Common in the living room while your two best friends made out with the Brezinsky twins from Saginaw who love no one, not even themselves, but you’re no gangbanger, you don’t even know how to shoot a gun, you don’t trust them because guns make efficient divorces, they kidnapped your papa and made a Christian lunatic out of your mama, in fact, if the police did their fucking research, they’d know you abhor guns and the idiots who use them to feel in control against the criminal world inside their own heads

I mean, come on coach, you know what it’s like, when you’re on the ice and you’re all hopped up and ready to go. You used to play too. And my dad played football and hockey for a bit when he was growing up. You should hear some of the things they’d say to each other then. He’s told me. Like some messed up shit. Like when we drive home after games, he says things to me, too. About how I need to move my feet more and keep my head up, and about how you’ve gotta dominate the enemy. Fuck ‘em. Get in their heads, ya know? That’s just part of the game. Chirping. Talking. Blowing kisses. Like, I get it, I understand what was so bad. But, I mean, come on coach, I’m sure it’s not the first time he’s heard that word. We listen to rap in the locker room, don’t we?

Aman is, by all medical and anecdotal accounts, dying. He is suffering primary, secondary, and quaternary injuries including, but not limited to, pulmonary barotrauma, mesenteric shearing, and penetrating ballistic gastrointestinal perforation, which is to say that blood is leaking, syrup-thick, from his abdomen, fully destroying his Cambridge University t-shirt and the waistband of his pajama pants. As a British Panavia Tornado warplane careens overhead, the irony of his extraordinarily British alma mater is not lost on him.

Wentworth sat alone in his apartment on New Year’s Eve, daydreaming about a reading party held in honor of his debut novel, which in reality remained unfinished. The well-dressed guests sipping coffee and cognac, the dimly lit library with mahogany chairs and velvet cushions, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf walls; it was a magical scene. He allowed these images to take hold of him as though for the first time, when in fact they had played out in his mind before, like a film on repeat.

I stepped off a plane in Dar es Salaam, an energetic twenty-year-old in search of total transformation. I didn’t yet know that Tanzania’s commercial capital, nicknamed Bongo, was a fast-paced city where you had to use your brains to survive. All I knew was that it was home to a relatively affordable Swahili program at the nation’s oldest university. When my mother saw the pictures of the harbor in my guidebook, she gasped and said, “It looks downright Dickensian.” I hadn’t read Dickens yet, so I asked her what she meant. “Teeming,” she said. Going into my eight-week course, what I lacked in street smarts I made up for with an exceptionally hopeful heart.

We are grateful to the contributions of over 500 writers and artists producing around the word of our choosing: Uprising.

The value of art lies in the tale: he explained to me why he must search for the wood out of which he would carve his sculpture. It does not lie in the hands of an artist. It is not found in the chisel he uses nor in the cast to be applied, but in the wood that he chooses. It is not just a simple matter of deciding whether to use the firmness of kamagong or the pliability of batikuling; it is in the story behind the wood. A wood with a story. It must not be just any story as that of wood bought from a lumber mill. The story of how lumber was cut down from the trunk of the oldest trees from national parks and how these were slipped past politicians and soldiers with a little grease.

but I drowned. Roman had promised an island, where we could eat coconuts and our spouses would not find us. But open ocean was too far to follow him, so I slipped underwater and did not come back up.

There was never any question of me leaving. There was no train in the timetable I could take, no car in a garage, not even a bike, and more importantly – now that we’d travelled far enough North – not a single road name on the map that would flag anything in my memory. But that’s not to say I was lost. Our position was always clear; we were a slow-moving pin on the veins of England, and this houseboat that smelled of oiled wood and time, and whose window shutters I’d painted green the day we moved in, was what constituted home now. Its decor of pine-panelled everything was hardly to my taste, but I’d learned to live with it and make my mark with white curtains, houseplants and a sparkling sink. I knew exactly where I was; only the outside kept changing.

In a field, the pollinator dips her instrument into flowers. She is under a white tent almost as large as the field itself—she and the others, all in white from head to toe, with goggles and gloves. The flowers are yellow, black-spotted, and the size of a man’s hand; rows and rows of them unroll into the distance. Eventually, they’ll die, and fruit will come. The fruit isn’t sweet, but bland and filled with seeds and nutrition. She hates it but eats it, like everyone else. No one speaks, though once in a while a throat clears or something electronic beeps or vibrates. Hours go by when she doesn’t think about home, the apartment, her girlfriend. It shouldn’t bother her so much to allow herself to be blank for a while, but she’s bothered.

“Who in their right mind uses a credit card to buy thousands of toy cars? It ruined our trip to England.” Laura turned to April, waiting for her to ask questions to keep the story going.

Are you having difficulty getting started? Experiencing frequent urges to go? Has your prostate ballooned to proportions that defy the laws of medical science?

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

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.

“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?

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners for our Special Issue on Loneliness. In selecting finalists, our dedicated Reading Board worked closely with Shir Kehila, online nonfiction editor; Sylvia Gindick, online poetry editor; Victoria Rucinski, online fiction editor, and Eiliza Callahan, art editor.

When she came back from Tokyo for the first time, she was famous, she was twelve and she didn’t recognize her own apartment.

They are click-bait beautiful, my boyfriend and his other girl. Movie star innocence: his blue eyes, her yellow hair. On loop, I watch them dance in the school gymnasium, gold light sloshing at their ankles. How he smiles when she trips, tottering like a doe in her shiny stilettos. How she falls into him like rain, their mouths pressed together in osmosis. The video—sent to me at midnight, the ring of the notification unbearable—illuminates the bleached square of my bedroom, my face cleansed by the blue screen.

Madeline Garfinkle, Columns Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Hilary Leichter to discuss her new book, Temporary, a debut novel that addresses the paradox of work-life balance and what we sacrifice of ourselves for a career. The unnamed narrator, who is a designated Temp, sifts through a series of jobs which include working on a pirate ship, filling in for an endangered species, serving alongside a murderer, and acting as a boy’s mother, just to name a few. The novel brings forth essential questions about the value of work, time, and how life can slip through our fingers.

Columbia Journal is delighted to announce the shortlist for our Special Issue on Loneliness. Our dedicated team of readers and editors culled through a pool of more than 400 submissions that were each uniquely moving.