The Columbia Review Spring 2021 by The Columbia Review

THE COLUMBIA REVIEW Vol. 102 | Issue 2 | Spring 2021

spring 2021

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Many thanks to Kate Zambreno and Asiya Wadud for judging this year’s Prose and Poetry Prize Contests.

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An Editors’ Note

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contents

GENEVA

Safia Elhillo

(porthole)

Ja cks on Watson

Brown and Rotted Harvest

Phi l i p A l e xander Mills

Letter

Wi l liam Fargas on

Dwelt in Drift

Jo el Ro ber t Fergu s on

Graveyard Perambulations

M.P. Powers

ssnottets

Ava Hofmann

54 Names for a Claude Glass

Da vi d Ku tz-Marks

[The wash recedes,]

Ja cks on Watson

Ouroboros

M.P. Powers

A Mirror Shattered in the Foyer

Sam Wilcox

SYROS

Safia Elhillo

Four Haiku

Su zu ki Shizu ko tr. Brianna Noll

Winter Song

Annette C. Boehm

That too is stealing

Timmy Straw

Style

Corey Sobel

Accident in the Mountain West

Cady Favazzo

the immortal jellyfish

Jas on Gordon

Off Skillman Street

A l es s andra Allen

Natasha

Ro ber t Fernande z

RIVER

Owen Park

yes, i am done with the god of white men

Au rielle Marie

WHY ISN’T THERE A THIRD INTIFADA

Edw ard Salem

vol 101

issue 2

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Attica!

Timmy Straw

Cell XI (Portrait)

Ja ckson Wats on

It’s 1999 & I remember the school bus in silence except for the song whose lyrics list the names of women, its endless loop that year. In school I track the brief switches into English, enough to overhear about my clothes, my strangeness, testimonies from gym class that I run “like an African.” By silence I mean that I did not speak the language, a trait that found me in the early countries & remained. & in gym class I tug myself away from the steady rhythm of the group jog, ask my body to go & it does, faster & it understands my language. What has changed, what is different about the girl in that story? The language of the asking? The language of the body? I say run & she unfurls roots, faster & she starts to cry. In our group text, Basma says I grieve most for our younger selves. That cloistering, that cosmic silence, the belief that if we were told in any detail what we weren’t allowed to do, we would take from the details instructions for the doing. Told only, instead, don’t. Never. Good girls don’t. Older now & tending each keloid, everything we allowed to be done to us in silence. To ask for help would be to speak & of course we never spoke. Go. See her, running, little bird in full possession of that body. Little animal, faster, untouched. Of course I tell the story because I fell. Going too fast & tripped, shot forward, projectile, a hand put out to brace my pitch. Hot spread of nerves registering the breaking bone. Iodine, gypsum, plaster of Paris. Months later, clean slice through the shell of the cast, & my freed arm, grown used to the weight, floating upward like a balloon, like a hand raised to speak.

Saf ia Elh illo

Spring 2021 Poe t r y Pri z e Winne r

GENEVA

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(porthole) Jackson Watson High above the state I was born in. My father’s voice in the phone, while I north and so ironic. For what it’s worth, our family has always had a taste for the dramatic. I listen and my voice is below the one speaking, a low echo of my own and so deeper, for his pleasure. ‘Well... I have to agree. I was talking to your sister and I noticed I was choosing my words to seem, well not to make a scene but picking them to heighten the emotion.’ And like you she knows how to pull the strings of all our bodies, not quite puppeteering. ‘Well, yes, I guess I need to agree. But I caught myself and wondered, why?’ I read a woman exiled from her country, de Staël, who cast her children in the theatre of an apartment remodeled: in twenty-four hours there is no room for anything but a catastrophe.’ ‘That,’ he says, ‘was dramatic.’ Silence passes under us like white wine, slightly yellow. ‘I pray you still respect me as a human,’ and I cut the line, hung up on the sudden distance not given but bought by the force of return, same god and concept. Between us nothing but a phone, cordless in the mess of an outrage, estrangement. But the funding. Get forgiveness. Pick the language.

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Brown and Rotted Harvest Philip Alexander Mills

I My grandfather has the most fertile garden soft figs and spoiled grape vines juice of the yew-berries sapping along his back If you hide behind the rosebushes and peek through the tangle you might see him, past the old trees bowing over his vegetables in soft spoken prayer II Παππού, το σύκο έχει στόμα σου μιλάει; υαι, μου μιλάει τι σου λέει; πολλά τι σου λέει, παιδί μου; III Near the eggplant field, there is a toolshed where the brown and rotted harvest is stored, and pickled in buckets of diluted vinegar

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Fill the buckets, feed them until the vinegar overflows overflows, the frothing sour that blankets his feet, and blankets the ground Glut. Glut. IV Hear it, indistinct that droning noise the sweetest voice Αλέξαυδρε, Αλέξαυδρε

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Letter William Fargason

Erasure of a letter sent by my great-grandfather to President Roosevelt about funding for the school board in the county where he taught. His letter was reprinted by the Fannin County Times on Thursday, August 1, 1940. I don’t suppose this get through

will ever

I understand a man must throw around himself in the chance it might. I am this Idea of yours developed through the difficult years As always some of these ideas were good some were not I might live more abundantly I know I am just a drop in this Great River all along I have flowed, speeding up the Current, that we might reach the Sea. I am

With

Problem birth

troubled with

the

everything

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Now here is our prob Power came into this land. A dam was built, the place flooded. in this mountain only the valleys are being flooded not farmed lem.

This all

matters

I will have to run Life

know

you

this

Yes I the goal is

must close. Yes I will move on, but “What of them? why Can’t you help us? I remain, Worried I am by the Wayside. I am deadly serious.

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Dwelt in Drift Joel Rober t Ferguson

Verlaine dreams about the ineffable lover; I dream of houses. Waking pieces rearranged: lemon trim, labyrinthine, all mine. And I its, in the country, East Hants County, drive past it every third dream. Say it, it isn’t actually there. Dust of passed worlds yet to be scrubbed off, daylight thru dirty glass. Or it’s up in the hill country, Nutby Mountain, I assemble it by hand, I think, tho I don’t feel any tools in my hands. Firs popping green, white-blue of glaciers on mountains that close us off, save for the dirt road. Everyone is coming home. Even the dead are visiting while the old grudges stay dead. Fields in high weed, farm equipment abuzz at the factory farms beyond us. For it is an us. The porch whitewashed, table set. What mode of life is this? The dream’s globe spins out, shatters, recedes under the sun.

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Graveyard Perambulations M.P. Powers

It’s the witching hour in Berlin, hour of pink moons and migrating shadows, when the trains are sleeping, when the kebab shops are closed, when the only way home is through the backend of a sex toy shop and a blighted Bulgarian graveyard. Wandering among crumbled tombstones under fetal thickening clouds, my shoes eaten by goat-shaped shadows and muffling the laughter of the dead. The dead are laughing because they are dead and they know. A whole village of knowing witching hour Bulgarians laughing quietly and dead as the roots of the grass argue with the worms and the worms berate the church and the church castigates a crow and the crow shouting at the sun that sticks its purple fingers through the trees and touches me between the shoulderblades, reminding me why the dead are laughing.

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ssnottets Ava Hofmann

“ssnottets” is pronoun c’d you manwife suh-snot-ets or social security number aught ets (?) like necro-[word], i’m only into being a woman for the lucrative brand deals as revenge for a cis wyrd’s cis childhid i only type for my own evil evil purposes never for

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ssnottets Ava Hofmann

isle get bored in the rock of this form soon i will change in to another – “a not her”? – never noticed that before not iced the ice of value melts god this one sucks i give up on the idea i did that as a kid too returnturn to the image: greasy shirt cult leader named

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ssnottets Ava Hofmann

capital exhaustingme that decade ago out of me laborburning off that prepretransition me you’d think that “…” but no i want that me her to live forever in that lil memaze of trag-eddies she’s still me still her still still lying on the grey couch staring at her my grey hand thinking i will remember this—that’s

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54 Names for a Claude Glass David Kutz-Marks

Scene before the war but as it wasn’t seen: merchants with their guns out mixing up a creole called English for the purpose of trading their things eye as fat and glassy and lightly ashed over as the eye of Polyphemus frozen little city of the winter with a little hot chocolate spilled over her a monitor with one of those filters on so no one else can see it childhood stuck in the mind tool for the lazy landscape painter with a justified fear of human subjects merchants unloading their crates in the background, a girl with flower hair the push of the water at dusk in the middle of a sentimental novel a stupid ars poetica about a fish returned to the ocean a moor, a Moor, more life a hill outside time in a cutesy little flea market jar sorry for eating the ice and it blew my mouth open

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the color of blood on an undeveloped negative casual reference to unreal place in real brushstrokes a bird in a bush, chirp chirp, involuntary smile lodestone, lodestar, man in a Texaco smoking a Pall Mall my son’s love for forklifts, my love for my beautiful son

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[The wash recedes,] (excerpt) Jackson Watson

Sam wakes to the sound of the water draining counterclockwise. He grabs the chain and blindly pulls it until he holds the stop and spins it into the drain. “Sam, that clearly isn’t comfortable! Jesus. The water is freezing, and I’ve spent an hour listening to you babble, half-asleep, and I’m afraid you’ll drown as soon as I stop watching. And if you don’t do that you’ll choke on your vomit—that shit will stop up your throat.” Ben, I dreamt I jumped in a river. For a second, my clothes floated, and then a flood rushed down. I was awake on some dirty bank. “Sam, you need to stop delaying.” Sam opens his eyes and wipes dry bits from his lips. Please… just give me some time. ... [Sam is in the lap of a large man, and he is sinking into it. The man’s legs stretch like a shepherd’s pen, surrounding him, and Sam feels himself shrink as the man pulls a book from a small space between Sam’s ribs. Look, Sam, the man says, unfolding it, it is a picture book, and Sam sees the image and little bit of script, which is explaining: Sam was in a lazy river, and the man reads, see, Sam, the river is full of sweat, piss, and himself, and when he drifts out of the river he is banked and breathing and unconscious, and the man says, so, Sam, what do you think will happen? He reads. Sam stands and looks into the river. In the water a face bubbles up from the space Sam’s weight had displaced, and it opens its mouth made of water and gulps, saying, I—I—I. See, Sam, it is hungry. Its lips flap like a door in the wind, and a fish swims through it, all the while water falls down in

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its jaws. The man flips the page, and the figure of the face slips, turning like a whirlpool, down the river. Sam can barely breath. The man turns the page. He says, Sam was once a wife. He sat in a white chair after a dinner with Ben’s MBA friends—do you see there? Sam lies. Someone has just had a baby which is in her cradle, and the wives, when the child stopped crying, asked Sam some questions. They wanted to know where Sam was from and what his family was. They wanted to know where Ben had found him and when. The man turns the page. In the image, Sam lies, saying, I am hiding my animal face—I am nineteen, a wife, I dance and am domestic. The man flips the page and mumbles, this is no good. In the image, a man is in a window with a face like a fat slab of salmon, shotgunning smoke into his wife, and asking for the score. Ben and his friends are in the background, smoking cigars. He flips the page, and an eagle is eating a dove, and on the right page is a deep divot in the earth like a wheelmark in the dirt, and he flips it again, shoving Sam’s face into the page and saying, look what you have done. He flips it and there is Sam and a wife, and she is wondering, how bad could one man be? He flips it faster and Sam sees himself falling, a worm, a calf slipping out from its mother, another flip and Sam cannot see anything but himself illegibly crawling, his body a long red mark. The man makes the images flip faster: a crow, a raven, an anus, the inside of a bearskin, and the man begins flipping the pages so quickly that he rips them out before Sam can understand. Look what you have done, and suddenly Sam is face down in mud, and heaving his neck up he sees his father swathed in a yellow Sunday suit.] ... [Sam is sweeping. He sweeps dirt together on a floor that is patterned with roses, and on the wall is bird decor, a calendar, and he sweeps the dirt until there is no furniture, just a few skeins on the floor. It is wild, this room that is absent of furniture. The north wind comes in and the skeins gathered scatter and unravel, and Sam must resweep them, and he keeps resweeping until he

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tries to move the dirt out of the door. On its hinge, the door flaps in the wind like a lip saying Sam has missed a spot: the frame is flapping and Sam hears let the mounds not mix; hold the whole; self-criticism, it has its limits, and Sam turns to see a gramophone that reeks of wet, real wood. The record spins in it, and Sam hears it tick and tick, the voice slowly droning, unity, hold the whole in your response; despair, let the mounds not mix, not make a hybrid, and the needle skips and stops, distorting into un...des..un...des.. undes...and it repeats and ceases. Sam hears knocking, and he is pulled toward the door which is flapping again in the wind. It opens on three little owls which line up at the threshold and he greets them as they end a riddle: who am I, they cry, and Sam senses behind him is still this room which is a dwelling without a place to rest or a second threshold, he cannot have guests. A wind unhinges the door which hits him. His body falls, but one owl coughs up a letter. It is shaped like an “A,” and he unfolds it and it says “A WORK OF ART IS A WORLD OF SIGNS AND DO NOT FORGET YOUR COAT WHERE YOU’RE GOING THE FREEZING WORLD WILL CROW YOU -love mother.”]

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Ouroboros M.P. Powers

South I never can be alone on this train this train hurling this train southward pouring through an eyebrow of fog and space and shadows like dragon’s tongues. This train I can never never never be alone on but tonight in spirit I am alone with the severed moonbeam on my lap and you and you. West Light crumbles. A Gothic cathedral vanishes. Pink mist clings to an electric billboard. The cabin is dreaming. The air is fat with disembodied voices. The train is an enormous Egyptian scarab trundling through the city, its frightened eyes glowing like TV screens, the night roaring in its wake.

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North Trying to get back to you but unable to escape this maddening Teufelskreis. All I do is go round, the moonbeam on my lap becoming a dogeared copy of The Divine Comedy, the song in my ear our song whose words I can’t remember. I can’t even remember when I boarded nor who I was when I did. I only know my heart. I only know as it leans upon your ghost. East The eastern light trots out on feeble legs. The sky has a diamond luster. A woman is soaked in twilight. The train isn’t even stopping at the stations anymore. The train is mad-eyed. The Ringbahn is a snake locking its jaw around its tail. I wait for a miracle. We pass under dragon’s tongues. I lean upon your ghost.

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A Mirror Shattered in the Foyer Sam Wilcox

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SYROS Safia Elhillo after Jenny Xie

Roads spiraling upward, whitewash of the houses, little island in late May. My friends & I descend in our hundred shades, three airplanes & a ferry to arrive, our rumpled linen clothes & earnest smells. Sleepier than the neighboring islands, their nightclubs, here we rent two tiny creaking cars & flush beneath every curious stare. We drive over cobblestones older than my surname, landscape of scrubby trees & bougainvillea. Stark lapis of the waters, narrow streets crowded with battered cats, one-eyed & carnivorous. The sea still clinging to the chill of late spring, too early to ease into summer. We swim dutifully & emerge shivering, to slippery plates of cuttlefish, cola in the glass bottle, sweetened with real sugar. Each hunted in the country we departed, we came to crowd a shared house, shared perfume of its plumbing, taking turns in the mornings frying eggs. In loose arrangement on the beach, we sit mostly in quiet, a book tented over each sleeping face. & in the town square in the evening, I let my breath go still, looking up into hundreds of lit windows like stars. I lean into sun-warmed rock, cooling in the night air, & think in another life I’d be a historian. & then it comes to us, in English, its inflections unfamiliar so I think at first it’s Greek. Here, at the opposite end of the world. Niggers. Niggers. & it was called to us by children.

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Four Haiku Suzuki Shizuko Translated by Brianna Noll

対決やじんじん昇る器の蒸気

taiketsu ya jinjin noboru utsuwa no jōki confrontation— a strong wind rising a bowl of hot steam

欲るこころ手袋の指器に触るる

horu kokoro tebukuro no yubi ki ni fururu heart’s desire to touch the gloves that contain your fingers

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菊は紙片の如く白めりヒロポン欠く

kiku wa shihen no gotoku shiromeri hiropon kaku chrysanthemum like scraps of graying paper Philopon1 withdrawal

裸か身や股の血脈あをく引き

hadaka mi ya momo no ketsumyaku aoku hiki nude body— blood vessel in your thigh a blue guideline

Philopon is the original brand name for methamphetamine, which was first developed in Japan. During WWII, it was widely used throughout the country by nearly everyone—from soldiers to factory workers and average citizens—leading to a crisis of drug abuse that lasted well into the 1950s and, to a lesser extent, still exists today. 1

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Winter Song Annette C. Boehm

The snowflakes never touch the ground the city’s tepid breath has come to melt each one to rain, and cannot hush the sound. The apples start to rot; they’re old I core, slice, slather them peanut butter them and wolf them down against the cold. Like New Year’s sparklers’ quiet hiss licked fingers on a burning wick just make it quick from ice to rain to tears, like this —

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That too is stealing Timmy Straw

In the janitor closet of two alone among the brooms and chemicals a bulb a mouse some vinegar the little shelf and thee was it waiting, I said, or stealing, you said, the body is not the song but the bearing of the song and nothing, nothing to tell of it. Took even the thought of it–– the cool at the bottom of the psalm, as praise is cold to touch, as heat gone cold in utterance, the jealous king who not yet king one day sang to Saul My lord is sweetest in the morning Like him I wished to sing in advance of feeling but that too you said that too is stealing––

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Style Spring 2021 Prose Priz e Winner Corey Sobel

35 The failed short story writer was raised in Fort Morgan, Colorado, a place he would decades later describe as existing a world apart from the “Colorado”—his scare quotes—that easterners imagine when they picture the state. Fort Morgan, he wrote, “is not purple mountains majesty; it is a brown blasted hellhole, nothing more than upturned crossbucks and hailstorms ripping leaves off the cottonwood trees.” 34 The dream of becoming a famous author was birthed in this barrenness, and it drove the failed short story writer to excel in Fort Morgan’s small, conservative high school, earning him a scholarship to the University of Northern Colorado. The scholarship wasn’t necessary for him to attend college—his father owned a lucrative cattle ranch—but was regardless fashioned by the young man into a symbol of emancipation, providing as it did financial independence from the father whose “bullshit” the failed short story writer claimed stank worse than the literal stuff that coated the ranch’s stockyards. 33 Senior year at UNC, the failed short story writer’s mother—his “father’s wife”—died of cervical cancer, an event he would never write about. 32 Following graduation, the failed short story writer moved to Washington D.C., where he worked odd jobs, ate one meal a day, and wrote whenever the mood struck—which was incessantly, the young man composing on park benches and Metrorail trains, on the grassy spring banks of the Potomac and in wintertime coffee shops where he crammed up against steam-streaked windows. The intensity

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of his impulse alone seemed to earn him the right to be published, and one fateful Monday he skipped his daily meal so as to afford printing and mailing his work. 31 When the rejections arrived, the failed short story writer consoled himself by reading biographies of authors whose own early efforts had gone uncelebrated, people like Hawthorne and Bukowski. And once the initial flush of injured anger had passed, he could reread his submitted story with a cooler eye and recognize that it was indeed an apprentice work; it lacked the mature style that would have made the story’s disparate elements cohere. That style, he was certain, would not be long in coming. 30 Still unpublished at 27, he fell in love, married, and watched a daughter enter the world, spurring him to trade the odd jobs for a grant-writing position at an international development NGO downtown. He had no expertise in this field, nor did he want it; he would have sooner reread a Cheever story than “scrape his pupils” against the day’s newspaper. But what attracted him, apart from the steady income, were the position’s fixed parameters—9 a.m.–5 p.m. Monday to Friday, an hour for lunch. He knew that the discipline instilled by this schedule would push him “over the hump” and allow him to discover his true style. He wrote during his lunch breaks every weekday, and for another 45 minutes before bed. 29 His 30s saw him take a more technical view of his craft; perhaps, he thought, it was the specific words a writer deployed—the “arsenal”—that fostered one’s natural style. The conviction that specific words would emancipate his authentic voice led him to keep a running list of new words he came across in his increasingly esoteric reading. He would use those words every time he wrote, and the list grew so extensive that he could compose whole stories solely with selections from it. The failed short story writer looked back on his twentysomething self with benign bemusement, shaking his head at the belief that a real style could be fostered by unbounded freedom.

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28 By the year he turned 45 the failed short story writer had tired of formalism, viewing his continued rejections as damning evidence against the method. Though he kept writing from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. each weekday, and for another forty-five minutes before bed, his prose began to seem rudderless, and he found his stories were all sounding the same. Around this time, his international development organization became embroiled in a controversy over misallocated grants to Tajikistan, a scandal that resulted in the NGO’s closure. Luckily, his wife earned enough money to patch the family over and, “God being good,” their daughter took after her father and won a scholarship to college. 27 For two months the failed short story writer was confronted with whole days of free time, but he only allowed himself his usual writing segments, using the other hours to apply for jobs. He was eventually hired by a new international development organization founded by many of the same people who had run his previous NGO—entering a new office filled with familiar faces proved to be one of the more gutting experiences of his life. 26 The failed short story writer had seen neither Fort Morgan nor his father in over two decades, but he was forced to return to both when his father was diagnosed with dementia. Moving back into his boyhood bedroom, the failed short story writer commenced settling his father’s accounts, not surprised in the least to discover that his name was missing from the old man’s will. The father called the son he didn’t recognize an “interloper,” and among the old man’s other strange habits was that of repeatedly removing antique lamps from the desks and bureaus and tables in the house and setting them onto the warped wooden floorboards. At first, the failed short story writer would restore the lamps to their rightful places; but after finding them back on the floors time and time again, he finally left them where they stood. At night, the lamps would light his steps.

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25 The failed short story writer phoned his daughter frequently during his trips to Fort Morgan. He would end each conversation by saying, “I promise I won’t put you through this,” terrified he would one day develop his father’s disease and treat his daughter in the same harsh manner. To this, the failed short story writer’s daughter replied with two points: 1) As opposed to his childhood, hers had been a loving one, and she would adore him to the very end; and 2) If the failed short story writer was so afraid, why not write a letter that instructed himself not to duplicate his father’s abuses? He could mail that letter to her, and by so doing provide insurance against any future cruelty. 24 She had been joking about the second point, but the failed short story writer didn’t care and set out to do exactly as she suggested. 23 Sitting at the same rolltop desk where he had composed his earliest fiction, the failed short story writer listed every aggression his father had committed over the past weeks. This was acidic work, lacking adjectives, dialogue, and all his other usual compositional tools. But as the failed short story writer moved from the most recent indignities to the founding enormities of his childhood, the writing took on a momentum—the farther back the failed short story writer reached, the danker and richer his language became. As he would later on describe it, “that curt, crabbed list bloomed into sentences, sentences unfurled into paragraphs, paragraphs stacked into stories that pitched Dad against the younger Me.” 22 Returning to Washington, the failed short story writer called his daughter and relished the surprise in her voice when she told him sure, she would keep her eye out for his letter.

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21 The trip to Colorado was the longest break the failed short story writer had ever taken from fiction as an adult, and he returned to his stories “with rabidity.” He began leaving his desk early for lunch and returned much later than usual, so enraptured by his writing that he lost all feeling for the passing—“the accumulation”—of time. He also wrote long past midnight in his apartment’s study, bearing down on his legal pads, scribbling on their cardboard backs when he ran out of paper. His wife, meanwhile, tossed and turned in bed, unaccustomed to the extra roaming space. 20 The failed short story writer walked sobbing through his Northwest Washington neighborhood the day he received notice that Harper’s had accepted his story for publication. Literary agents who had for years sent him generic rejections now wrote him by the dozen offering representation, and his debut book of stories was to be the first to receive the Pen/Faulkner, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award all in the same cycle. 19 Struggling to describe the style of this collection, reviewers fell back on calling the stories “morally serious.” 18 His first author photograph—featured on the dust jacket of the collection, Night’s Owls—showed the failed short story writer in profile, caught mid-laugh, showing off a mouth of straight, yellow teeth. Sitting at a fold-out table in a Dupont Circle bookstore and waiting for the first fans to approach, he looked at this photograph and felt stymied: Though he could remember the session with the photographer, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his publisher had found a dead ringer to sit for this particular photo—someone who could smile a smile the failed short story writer himself was incapable of forming.

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17 In the time between the publication of Night’s Owls and his historic flush of awards, the failed short story writer continued his day job writing grant applications. When he finally gave his notice, a reporter for the New York Times Magazine received permission to follow him around on his last day of work. The profile—which itself went on to win a National Magazine Award—caught several notable moments, and crowning of these was the final scene in which the failed short story writer bought a beer for his supervisor in a Farragut neighborhood bar. Speaking into his bottle of Sam Adams, the boss muttered, “I didn’t know you wrote.” This quote hardened into myth overnight and led several critics to remark on the uncanny similarities—physical and otherwise—between the failed short story writer and Wallace Stevens. 16 Following the rave reception of his sophomore effort—Swallow’s Downs—the failed short story writer was mounted in the august hall of Late Bloomers, alongside eminences such as Walker Percy, Norman Rush, and José Saramago. 15 Much of the literary prize money was spent on flights to and from Colorado. The failed short story writer traveled alone; his wife offered to accompany him, but the father of the failed short story writer had a habit of welcoming visitors by staring suspiciously at them through the front screen door, an experience the failed short story writer was glad to spare his wife. His daughter also asked to come, but he was proud that she had never stepped foot on Coloradan soil. He told her to stay home, explaining that he wanted to keep her heart “unalloyed.” 14 The father mistook his son for long-dead relatives—most often, he called him “Jerry,” the name of the father’s older brother. The failed short story writer’s uncle and father had been orphaned at ages 17 and 10 in Kearney, Nebraska, and

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Jerry had raised his little brother by himself. The men grew distant over the years for reasons neither had fully understood, and their estrangement grew so absolute that the failed short story writer’s father only learned of his brother’s suicide, at 51, from an old Kearney friend who called to deliver the news. The failed short story writer had watched his father avoid mention of his brother’s death for the next 30 years, and it took the old man losing his mind to finally feel free to say, “I love you, Jer.” The son did not correct his father’s mistake. 13 One morning in February, the failed short story writer’s father absconded with his live-in nurse’s car keys and went for a long drive around eastern Colorado. He and the car were discovered at the base of the Great Sand Dunes, and from then on the nurse took special care to hide her keys. This only led the father, later that month, to make away with the ATV he had once used to motor around his ranch. As the sun set over stubbled wheat fields, he drove the vehicle onto the wrong side of Interstate 76 and sped straight for an oncoming minivan, causing the van to swerve and flip a full two rotations. The mother, father, and infant child inside miraculously survived the crash, and their lawsuit was settled out of court. 12 The father was moved permanently to a facility in Denver. When the failed short story writer visited, his father would call him by his own name, as if his son were a younger double. The failed short story writer’s first biographer, a New Yorker staff writer, linked these experiences to the near-suffocating darkness of what would be commonly referred to as his “Middle Period” stories. 11 The failed short story writer asked his wife and daughter to stay put. He flew alone to Colorado, oversaw his father’s cremation, and spread the remains onto his father’s still-lucrative stockyard—the management of which was handled by a rancher the failed short story writer described, in an email home, as “an ashgobbling frontiersman.”

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10 By 60, the failed short story writer had settled comfortably into the role of living legend, accepting invitations to give commencement speeches, smiling out benevolently on a Manhattan stage while a grizzled Hollywood star announced the bestowal of this year’s Hadada Award to “the genius sitting to my left.” 9 The daughter of the failed short story writer showed promise as an author in her own right. After sharing the manuscript of her first novel with her father’s literary agent, she became embroiled in a bidding war over not only that book, but over her second, as-yet-unwritten novel. Her father seldom bore her ill will. 8 The wife of the failed short story writer never laid a fictional word to paper. Though they no longer needed the money, she continued to work as manager of a boutique Washington hotel, and she often believed her husband when he wrote, in every book dedication, a variation on, “I owe you more than can ever be counted.” She pretended to humor her husband’s surprise announcement that they would be relocating to the artistic haven of Marfa, and she skillfully quashed the idea by asking, one day over breakfast, if the failed short story writer had heard that a younger female protégé of his had recently been awarded a Lannan Writing Residency, which by coincidence would also lead her to relocate to Texas. The failed short story writer said he had not heard, and a few days later he told his wife that they were probably burning through their 70s quickly enough without the added stress of moving. 7 Like Dickens, the failed short story writer’s pace of production slowed some in his last phase, but unlike Wordsworth, his late works were not mere self-congratulatory, self-parodying dross. As one critic noted, Philip Roth wasn’t

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a fitting analogue, either, since Roth’s career was a study in great bookends. The failed short story writer had never faltered, not even when his short-term memory began to get shorter and his steady scholarly manner began flaking away, exposing an unexpected rawness underneath. 6 The failed short story writer tucked in his father for the night and returned to his boyhood bedroom. It was summertime and, just as he had as a child, he climbed through his window and sat on the front porch’s flat roof, holding his knees to his chest as he listened to an unseen freight train moan. He was lulled into a kind of happiness, and he was nearly startled off the roof when he heard the sound of glass shattering inside. He climbed back into his room and rushed down the steps, needing to stop his father from destroying all the lamps— and when he reached the bottom landing, he looked up to find he was standing in the front hall closet of his Washington D.C. home. His wife held his hand, smiling through tears. 5 Protective of his legacy, the failed short story writer enlisted his wife and daughter to help hide his degeneration. Ceremonies for honorary doctorates and lifetime achievement awards were graciously declined. Fan letters went unanswered, and his long-time editor and agent were instructed to contact his daughter for all discussions of royalties, permissions, anniversary editions. Even his oldest friends failed to have their calls returned, and little was done to discourage rumors that he’d become a second Pynchon. His wife moved them to Poolesville, Maryland, where they took over an old farmhouse and a half-dozen acres out back. On their daily dawn walks along the fallow furrows, the failed short story writer would sometimes make light-hearted jokes about his decline, and other times accused his wife of not taking his suffering seriously. She held her tongue, by and large.

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4 The failed short story writer’s daughter regularly rode the Amtrak from Manhattan to Maryland to help care for him, scribbling detailed notes during these visits that her lucid father would have encouraged her to be “ruthless” with. 3 Rumors notwithstanding, the public had no reason to suspect the failed short story writer’s maddening. He was still publishing regularly, and the stories were agreed to be the best of his career—written in a style that was somehow both fresh and completely in keeping with the man’s earlier work. What the agent who placed these stories didn’t know was that they were written as many as 50 years earlier, fiction no publication had been willing to publish and that the failed short story writer had meticulously filed away. To avoid suspicion, the daughter would re-type a yellowed story on her laptop before forwarding it to the agent. 2 The earliest tales of the failed short story writer—produced, rejected, and filed when he was in his 20s—made up his final collection, Ocelot’s Eyes. The book’s publication, and the author’s death two weeks after, led critics to call it his Brothers Karamazov. The failed short story writer was buried in a Poolesville cemetery. 1 The notes taken by the daughter were eventually turned into a bestselling memoir, one that divided critics—some claimed she had surpassed her father’s brilliance, while others viewed it as a study in opportunism. And yet there was consensus about the book’s single most memorable moment: the scene in which the failed short story writer, screaming through his final days, accused his wife and daughter of “impostering.” His daughter rushed back to her bedroom to retrieve the letter he wrote himself decades before, which she had brought to Poolesville on the suspicion that she would need it. After reading the letter, the failed short story writer threw it to the floor, sneered at his family, and haughtily informed them: “That’s not my style.”

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Accident in the Mountain West Cady Favazzo

Provo, UT, 1988 too much thin, cold air the skin of sky a strained blue stretched taut across the desert lit with winter sun behind the shadow of a bucket truck parked on soil that can’t grow shit--no tomatoes, no marigolds but someone planted a powerline six feet deep and the boom ladder knocked 7200 volts into an old body and a young one and another, grabbing the ankles of the first and another, grabbing the wrists of the third then, staggering onto the open wire four wet bags scattered, conducting heat the soil flickering with heavy metal

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the immortal jellyfish Jason Gordon

falls up towards the stars the umbrella won’t die beach chair won’t fold mold on the bread I feed to the moon

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Off Skillman Street Alessandra Allen

I. April I imagine I am a chemist’s wife and she makes me a vaccine and I enter the world again. No, I am not mooning for you. My balcony juts towards the train station just above where someone else’s balcony juts. Surely this person thinks I have a dog. Treading the carpet day after day—at least I have carpet. An anxious creature that watches me pee. Perks its ears at every passing siren, of which there are many, this is a metroplex, even at night. The ambulances call, are calling. The mirror in the bathroom is suspiciously hairy. She says there is, you know, a science to it. I do not ask her a science to what. I do not converse with anyone besides my mother. I do not know what I do all day besides brewing. Last night a neighbor’s dog got taken by a pack of them. That’s what they sound like, a baby, though rabbits are worse. You know when they’ve snapped its neck because suddenly it’s silent. Yes, I listened, my head over the edge of the balcony, my stomach rumbling. I’m hungry. Animal control will be called. The small dogs of this apartment complex are the innocents. But the coyotes don’t care that our neighbors don’t like them. They make their homes in the park, mistake the ambulances coming down Skillman for their cousins and howl with them. The chemist’s wife is lucky: live close enough to the freeway and you live near the ocean. Across from her, a juvenile coyote bends her way towards her den. The DART passes, and she watches its reflection in the runoff, and one of them is moving, the train or the water, though it is hard to tell which.

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II. October The coyotes off Skillman love an ambulance. The humans learn to abhor them. Every month that passes is another tsunami of death, another all-time-record of death. My hands smell like a smoker’s hands in April. I put curtains up; the sky comes in and flaps them. Somewhere in a hospital bed my grandfather is breathing his last breaths of life. My brain is an instrument. It makes music. The hardest part is being stuck here while our loved ones are so far away—that is its refrain. I imagine his hospital room faces the ocean, I imagine the beaches are rocky and gray, I imagine the night air is cold, reminds him of my mother. He is dying alone in a hospital room, says the chemist’s wife. There is no beauty here. I do not ask her where the beauty is if it is not here. As for my mother and I, we rebel how we can; we are each other’s conspirators. I fight the urge to go to a bar, the bar, Sue Ellen’s. Over the past six months three different doctors expressed concern about the thick, black hair that grows under my chin. I do not ask if my body produces it then why is it bad. Memory is all the soft light and all the skin it lands on, like a puddle I can’t touch. I read and read. I learn that coyotes howl for population control and wonder if the ambulances deceive them, if their litters are smaller because of this, because they are lulled into believing they are safe.

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III. July I hunch when someone approaches and widen my lips. It is a smile of submission, please don’t attack me, I come in peace. In Dallas in July we are all predators with a sharing problem. I’m touch starved, I tell the chemist’s wife, but she does not want to hear it. I am a baby to the feeling of living in this apartment. To dealing with memory, which overtakes me, takes me out of my day. I grab a glass from the cabinet, and suddenly you’re fucking the beast into me. I put water and vodka in my sweet tea and lemonade. I see your exertion. I listen to the traffic and the tree-branch casts of your fingers dance on the wall. I see your chest indent right here, three inches below the collar bone. Every stranger is a stranger. Every stranger passes without incident. I do not wish a stranger would turn and ravage me. I spend the day thinking about my grandfather thinking about a woman, any woman at all. I want to go down there and leave myself to them. They will distance themselves at first, wary of my scent, of the diseases I might bring. Maybe they avoid me until I am carrion. Perhaps this is enough time for Animal Control to lace me with poison, and the coyotes, having eaten me, will be riddled with seizures and blindness.

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IV. October Meanwhile, night comes every night. My toes look like someone else’s toes. On Skillman and Walnut Hill they are doing construction. Some nights go by with no ambulances at all. Memory gives me just a ghost—your face, if you must know. A coyote will eat anything, though I never learned what she prefers. I get hairier, harried. This afternoon is a cage, this afternoon closes in on us, this afternoon is a pound, a group of catchers, a state-wide hunting competition, an ambush. Fall air brings the smell of burning. Somewhere at a bar in Oak Lawn someone is telling a joke. The rest of us sit with our memories. I’m so self-conscious now they’re tinged. I concentrate on your body, on your breasts that move like swallows. I move, you move somewhere inside me. Does it not warp everything. Outside the coyotes are screeching. The air is bone dry like my body. Somehow, despite this, the window is fogged. I look into it and want to see your rivets. Your saliva in them. Instead, two beasts of myself move scentlessly. My toes. My full earlobes. My beloved napes.

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Natasha Rober t Fernande z

the land was cut the clouds were cut your nails were long and rainbow Natasha your red sweater up your brown arms July clipper to the widow’s peak go high on the sideburns now we eat pasta star soup at Mike’s house

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now Mike and Melissa so beautiful now we get in fist fights acid fires blazing across Emerald Hills she’s tiny maybe 5’ face like cut words has a bluegreen shard of light in his cheek a certain sensitivity full feeling pouring it all back

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so many compact powders when I cough they crack the girls lay out a cup of shining dark noodles don’t look it hurts skin sees it all kites at John Lloyd state park every strand perfect every texture deepening

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we could fucking die if I had become black towels on the beach red ice all shine Mike’s swagger a bit like Nino Brown who among you plays basketball? feeding me nachos while I drive her car goddamn so exhausting

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bunch of young bodies smell like Angel and Calvin Klein we all master lies deep making out sucking face like it’s the 90s into your black hair like rain draining into rainbow drug from the moat like a plug of red hair lifted from the drain never end never begin

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RIVER Owen Park

Each time I came back, another foot of water had somehow preceded me, gray thickness uninvited. It became so that I took my shoes off before entering. Standing inside my childhood home, my naked feet felt the living room rug I’d known so long begin to saturate, and then peel from itself in tattered strips like a betrayed guitar. I would come by every few weeks or so to check in on my parents, having moved back up there to be closer to them as their lives began to ripen like oranges. I wanted them to leave that house, but they had performed one radical act of relocation in their years, and I knew I would never get them to do anything like that again. It had taken too long for them to rest their heads there, too long for that which they laid upon to start feeling like earth. Instead, they adapted in their way, carving their days around the water as if it were a season. As its lapping ripples began to threaten his computer, which I had spent weeks helping him set up, my father bought a standing desk. Yeah: that was him. I asked, “Where will you sleep?” His answer: “Air mattress.” I came in once while they were having a lie-down, and sure enough, I found them floating on their new beds like small ships of plastic and bone, two feet between their faces and the ceiling. My mother was no different. When she could no longer cook, the stovetop submerged, she ate strictly from her garden, resting cutting boards of chopped vegetables on the water’s surface and gently pushing them toward me as I entered the house. I found a nice thin bowl and began filling it with little portions of meat, as much as the water could carry, and sending them like bottled messages toward her and my father in return. One thing I learned over those months: rice always sinks.

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After dinner, as I left the house, stumbling, eventually wading, eventually swimming, I would turn myself around, call to my parents, “I love you! I’ll see you soon.” I can still picture my mother’s face smiling after me, the rest of her, beneath her neck and her one waving hand, invisible. Her hair, so long and frayed, so wet in a way I could never have pictured it as a kid. Approaching my car, again, I’d turn, looking back at that house and the small plot of dry land around it. My father used to tend to his land more dotingly, with greater rigor, but now weeds sprouted from every corner, crawling even into the house’s windows and over its walls. One day I returned there, bowl in hand, and the house was gone, and in its place was a river. It ran horizontally before me, right through where the house had stood, and then bent forward, straight down my line of vision, current pulsing out farther than my eyes could see. For what it was worth, the river seemed to have swept away the weeds, the land’s green fatter, more lush than I had ever seen it. The river sparkled, throwing itself with small glinting fits into the vacant air. “Omma! Appa!” I cried. There was no sign of them. Quickly, I began to follow the river. I walked around its great curve, padded beside it down the grassy slope which used to form my backyard. The river was almost impossibly clear, unsullied with lint or houseware, and in it I saw the multicolored brushstrokes of swimming fish. I didn’t know how all that life could have formed there so quickly, where no river had been not long ago. I continued alongside the river; we became something like partners. I called for my parents until I was out of breath, and the sun started to set, and I began to slow down. I knelt to the river and splashed its water in my face. I filled my bowl with the river and drank. Then I continued to go where it was leading me. Though I had no evidence, no experience to speak from, I kept telling myself to believe it would end, or that at least, at some point, it would pour itself out into something bigger.

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yes, i am done with the god of white men Aurielle Marie

I chose instead the soft curdling holy of my roommate Che who bends theyself into glory before an altar + nine cool jars water pools and nips of whiskey + yes I’d rather praise a sovereign drunk or my petty + glorious + dead brother who never brushed his teeth I am no longer offering my earnings tax-free to your liar god + ruined divinity + I trust his funk less than I trust + policeman at my back we know that + as the same mercilessness + on a Sunday I dress my children in my mother’s toil + even then won’t trust your god with cleanliness + I think of Aunt Deborah her body + riddled with good + how I cried for her when she caught your god + holy like the plague + grown enough for the revival that year + I finally learned how many ribs I carried beneath my chest + let the minister + son trail his hand across them + if your god is the god of practice + I am the god of exploration + I am the god of finding names for all the places our bones meet + the god who solves the mystery of an appendix last august and every summer + your god let the black boys drop from the knees of the clouds like cartilage + you could say they were heaven-bound but I saw one go + right before me on Lowery Blvd a tennis racket in his damp hand + one eye toward the heavens + the other

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bulleted to pieces above the gutter + his strange body shook from me my peace + a memory of my aunt Deborah moaning your god’s name like a scorned lover + her tongue bloodied on his robe + I would’ve kept screaming don’t die, don’t die to them but a white man said you’re blocking the lane + I caught my hands holding each gasp at its joints + from outside my body + my body heard me wail + now the boy is gone + this is the work of your silly god + your murderous holy I wept Deborah’s name + her body missing + your god probably stole that too I don’t trust him to watch over us without taking + your bribes + I don’t trust him to not play devil’s advocate + I don’t trust your god to refrain from hunting our bodies, don’t trust he’ll resist the urge to stuff us with white folk + Get Out style + I think your god be trippin + I think you got stuck in + I think your god just got here + is playing catch up I think your god tricked his way into power + I’ve never played well with frauds

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WHY ISN’T THERE A THIRD INTIFADA? Edward Salem

What dumb fun I had, making the artworks I made, Driving around Birzeit University campus filming Maissa Sticking her head out the window shouting through a bullhorn, Her hair whipping in the wind as she delivered my lines To the bewildered, beautiful students laughing with us At the notion that they should go riot and Die at the checkpoints.

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Attica! Timmy Straw

To drink a coke is good and cruel and readymade as a white swan in the mind. Readymade: you say it and it’s there, like Genesis or John or like, when I am raised, a hot phone call. I am married here. I drink a coke. I see the sun. A pencil line from here to there, lay one fat forefinger on the map–– thus we bivouac, thus lay seige. This line is shipwreck, readymade, but all the same: ‘possess’––on either side–– it’s all there is to want––

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after all no mere spectator ever reached what they call “solid ground” or prayed his life be spared like did Sonny yelling Attica! and growing wings–– or what Columbus at his compline never heard, ‘The moral earth, it too is round...’

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Cell XI (Portrait) Jackson Watson after Louise Bourgeois

before me

a house made of teeth; truth unfurls as the real world builds its distent in me: my stomach is soup and the utensil, flint: thrust down in my eyes with the empty sound of profound disappointments, leaving red gaps where the eye is not needed: hungers that mumble: I want the future or perfect tense sun

since I

wander the martyr complex witnessing mouths flapping, bones folding a film of birdshit dropped in the Os of my eye-sockets I am a chicken cutlet: I do not speak, above the bed the devil spreads me thin as mud: I am a stump, he is a dog, guy-like (am sewn head swinging from rope knots my throat it chokes me out

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side of the house covered in a history of dying ivy, wisteria around me like a mummy I am rock except in the face of the mirror: where my skin is flayed I am all open an alpha carved dog claims me as its territory stench of piss & sex particulate, the field of me plowed, weighed down by the rain, the weather: harvest is without rest, it sits in the tense of potential—

I am in

the wind flowing cold through glass, like a deep spring the crack of lightning follows the sound of someone pushing me under: an umbrella hung like a curtain to keep up the notion,

things

neat—a pure bowl of water unmixed, contained in a bowl for change: it is made of veinless marble. The impossible father sits down for dinner, his own limbs sewn into each line

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of my phone: for grammar he pulled her easily perceivable corpse from where it was interred, his digging stern. “It was work,” he said, the signal strong from the dirt, and he was coming for a while. I woke up nauseous, like I’d been bent over the hinge of the world. I wondered what was touching my stomach—felt one pound pushing down on it, like a paperweight, and all I could do was move your hand, still wrapped like a perfectly preserved body in our shared sheets, from my stomach, off the sweat, off our rising, falling flesh—off me, as I slipped out of bed.

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CONTRIBU TO RS

Alessandra Allen is a poet currently living in New York City and Dallas. She loves the color yellow and her family. You can read more of her work at www. alessandraswriting.com. Annette C. Boehm is a queer poet from Germany. She serves as a poetry reader for Memorious, a Journal of New Verse and Fiction. She is the author of The Knowledge Weapon (2016) and two chapbooks, “E.D. Liberations” (2019) and “the five parts of love: confabulating sappho” (2012) (available from Dancing Girl Press). A second full-length collection of poems, The Apidictor Tapes, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2021. Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (forthcoming from One World/Random House), and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland. William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2020 Florida Book Award in Poetry (Gold Medal). His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and

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elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity and The Offing. He earned a BA in English from Auburn University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida. Cady Favazzo is a poet and teacher from Wyoming. You can find some of her recent work in Phoebe. Joel Robert Ferguson is a Canadian poet of working-class settler origins. Having been born and raised in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill, he now lives in Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory, where he will be pursuing a PhD in English Literature at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2021. Ferguson’s first poetry collection, The Lost Cafeteria, was published in 2020 by Signature Editions. Robert Fernandez is the author of the poetry collections We Are Pharaoh (Canarium, 2011), Pink Reef (Canarium, 2013), and Scarecrow (Wesleyan, 2016). He is co-translator of Azure (Wesleyan, 2015), a translation of the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have appeared in The Believer, Bennington Review, Chicago Review, Image, The Nation, The New Republic, Oversound, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Jason Gordon earned an MFA from the University of Maryland as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has authored one full-length poetry collection, Many Appetites (Spuyten Duyvil), as well as two chapbooks, I Stole a Briefcase (Pudding House Publications) and Attack of the Nihilist (Ravenna Press). He lives in Catonsville, Maryland, teaching English and creative writing at a middle school for children with dyslexia.

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Originally from Oxford, Ohio, Ava Hofmann is a trans writer currently living and working in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has poems published in or forthcoming from, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Daily, Fence, Anomaly, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, The Fanzine, Datableed, Peachmag, Always Crashing and Foglifter. Her interactive chapbook, “THE WOMAN FACTORY,” was published via The OS, and her full length collection “[...]”, is forthcoming in 2021, with more books on the way. Her website is www.nothnx.com and her twitter is @st_somatic. David Kutz-Marks is the author of Violin Playing Herself in a Mirror (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), selected by James Tate, Dara Wier and James Haug for the 2014 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, Boston Review, jubilat, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Aurielle Marie (they/she) is a Black, Atlanta-born, Queer poet, essayist, and social strategist. She was selected by Fatimah Asghar as the 2019 winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award. Aurielle has received invitations to fellowships from Tin House, The Watering Hole, Pink Door, and served as the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for Lambda Literary. Aurielle’s essays and poems have been featured in or are forthcoming from The Guardian, TriQuarterly, Adroit Journal, Teen Vogue, BOAAT Magazine, Essence, and many other platforms. Their poetry debut, Gumbo Ya Ya, won the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Fall of 2021. Brianna Noll is the author of The Era of Discontent (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the Elixir Press 20th Annual Poetry Award, and The Price of Scarlet (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), which was named

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one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. Co-founder and poetry editor of The Account, her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals, including the Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and Waxwing. She lives in Los Angeles. Edward Salem is a Palestinian writer and artist from Detroit. He was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of BOMB’s 2021 Fiction Contest, and by Louise Glück as a finalist for the 2021 Bergman Prize. He is the founder and co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides long-term residencies for writers who are in exile under threat of persecution. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Matter, Eclectica Magazine, and elsewhere. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at The Hangar in Beirut, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A deep commitment to the right of peoples to return to their lawful land propels his work. Corey Sobel is the author of The Redshirt, a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and one of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2020. Timmy Straw is a writer, musician, and translator (Russian), MFA in poetry forthcoming from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a recent Fulbright fellow to Moscow. They are also the co-editor of the Iowa Prison Writing Project, which publishes the work of incarcerated writers and poets. Their poems and essays have appeared in Jacket2, Tin House, Volta and elsewhere. Owen Park (he/him) is a junior at Columbia University studying creative writing.

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Philip Alexander Mills is a Greek-American poet, comedic journalist, and scientific researcher. He writes for The Slant, and his various works have been featured in The Vanderbilt Review and Polymers. He currently studies English and mechanical engineering as a sophomore at Vanderbilt University. M.P. Powers lives with one foot in Berlin, Germany, and the other in South Florida, where he rents out construction equipment. He is the editor of 11 Mag Berlin, and has been published in Red Fez, Chiron Review, Slipstream, Rosebud and many others. His blog can be found here: https://mppowers.wordpress. com/. Jackson Watson is a senior at Columbia University. They are from Georgia. Sam Wilcox is a writer and artist from Virginia, and a one-time English student at Columbia University. They are interested in solidity and form. Follow them @Sam_Bizarre on Twitter.

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Cover Art Anna Lang* *made with Runway The Columbia Review is published twice yearly by the students of Columbia University, New York, with support from the Activities Board at Columbia. This issue is sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative of Columbia University. Enquiries to: Columbia Review, Lerner Hall, 2920 Broadway, New York, NY 10027. Email: thecolumbiareview@gmail.com. Books and media sent for possible review become the property of The Columbia Review.Visit us online at: http://columbiareviewmag.com/. Copyright © 2021 by The Columbia Review. All rights reserved. Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law without permission of the publishers is unlawful.

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