The Columbia Review Fall 2023

ISSUE ONE

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The C

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EH UND RED FIVE

An Editors’ Note In the last decade, The Columbia Review has seen thousands of submissions, published 20 different editions, and successfully had 2 launch parties (from what we can track). During that time, the Editors came to a plethora of decisions on what The Columbia Review is committed to and stands for.

While these decisions may change on a semesterly basis, this past semester we drew our inspiration from Paul Spike, a former TCR editor. In his prefatory “Instructions” to the Fall 1969 issue, Paul Spike ends with a polemic: “We want to smash imperialism. We want to crush cliques beneath the boot. We want to spray literature from golden nozzles—the people’s gold.” His introduction raises the question of what a committed magazine might look like—its relationship to critique, to action, and to community.

With this introduction, The Columbia Review affirms our commitment to demands for collective liberation and solidarity.

We determined that we should equally aim to “smash imperialism” and in aligning ourselves fully with this initiative, the Editors came together and committed ourselves as members of Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

This decision is both a recognition of new commitments in the wake of unprecedented loss, and a recognition of old commitments that The Columbia Review editors have defended in historical moments like the Vietnam anti-war movement. This decision marks a new age of literature from golden nozzles.

“THIS is okay.”

— Udonne Eke-Okoro, Jonathan Truong, Judy Xie

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contents Steeplechase

A ng el a Ba l l

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Small Wood Table with Attached Bench

A ng el a Ba l l

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Brandon Rushton

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X a vi er Bl a ckwell-L ipkind

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Da vi d Ro m a nda

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Boudoir Ghazal

A l i so n Sto ne

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INSTEAD OF CHEWING A HOLE IN MY LIP...

Kel l y Weber

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Ma x K r ug er - Dull

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SLOTMACHINES4DUMMIES

A nd re w Bl a ke

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CASCADE

A a ro n Fa g a n

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Lynn Schm ei d ler

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from The Recombinant Historiographies Death Sentence Hairbrush

Beginners

Winsome and Losesome in Ten Backward Steps

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STEEPLECHASE Angela Ball

Steeples have a big responsibility, upholding the faith.

In a country of churches I do a running study of steeples: their gradients, stages, angles of ascent, presence or absence of terminal cross.

All are white, though a few have begun to discolor with rust or rot; to lean, vaguely lapsed.

None have belfries, those noisy papist extravagances.

Only height asserts itself, slimming toward the infinite.

One has a lightning rod that might be blasphemous.

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Today, for the first time, a steeple with windows on all sides. Miniature panes with white dividers radiating sunrise.

Who could get in to look out? Maybe a person’s head could, rising from an attic ladder. I would love to see the face of someone so alone.

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SMALL WOOD TABLE WITH ATTACHED BENCH Angela Ball

Picnic of nothing for one! But it’s behind a chained gate with a bold No Trespassing where purple flowers, yellow flowers have arranged October’s light When I stare at it I could swear it means something Its owner must know one can’t help but long for a thing so mute

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FROM THE RECOMBINANT HISTORIOGRAPHIES Brandon Rushton

The ruins tell a story the story of the ruins couldn’t tell the tangible fact of their collapse configured the ruins real and less abstract notions of narration revolved around the object lesson to behold is the object held in the hand of the historian who felt the fathoms feather out of her long-held hypothesis confirmed in the upper crust of an outer plain the tarps covering up the rain pouring in the distance down the clouds coming close like now the past almost graspable beyond its grand perimeter

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The dirt roads end in dazzles the sun draws the dirt roads toward a relevance imagined in the language memory makes itself a moss the light drapes through describing the light lost in the description of its range the road deducts the notion of its nature to disregard the margin means mainly to disregard the driven by the boundary the gate grants access to or doesn’t grant at all a meaning to the matters all around in their configuration of the field the farmers did not find the field but formed it

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The memory of the past constructed how it’s presently addressed as past purportedly the wind chimes struck a tone unlike a field with crops the hands can’t alternate enough of the reliably long-grown irrigated good sound night softens over waves the radio instincts the summer a synthesized series of events a window looks out at the wet leaves the roofing the darkness down the road that is a darkness whatever happens out of focus happens fast

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DEATH SENTENCE Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind

My name is Matthew Pernick, and I have a rule, which is that I do not finish sentences, because sentences are alive, and if you stick a period at the end of a sentence you are suffocating it, smothering it with a typed pillow, and I prefer to let sentences live and, no, I insist on letting sentences live and breathe and Let me be blunt: Periods, exclamation marks, and question marks are murder weapons, on the same moral plane as bullets, cudgels, and swords; writers who use them are guilty of Let me be blunter still: I am convinced that the day I finish a sentence is the day my life will come to an Here is a room, here is a table, here is the map of an art museum I have no recollection of visiting, here is a water bottle, here is an evil book with finished sentences, here is a second water bottle taller and thinner than the first, here is a Pope Francis candle with Barack Obama’s paper face taped over the Here is a Zoom link, here is a click (thumb), here is my lagging face, here is I am a student writing tutor at a university whose name you would not recognize, a university in the middle of the middle of Our mascot is corn (Corn); at the sports games I do not attend, a man dressed as Corn runs across the turfed field in a weird sort of protest, as in, I am a plant, or was once a plant, and I deserve real grass to run on, not this weird half-grass shit, and still he runs, runs, costume sagging like A person enters the Zoom room, which is not a real room, which is a flat place populated by the flat parts of people

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findable by various cameras, enters the Zoom room and says, hi, I have an essay that is only half finished and I am wondering whether you might to be willing to (I say — as I am trained to say, by screen-people whose flatness does nothing to conceal their oldness — of course, let’s get right into The essay, as it turns out, ends mid-sentence, midthought, midIn that sense, he has written, Churchill’s stutter constitutes not only an oratorical tool, but also a I ask, why do you say your essay is only half finished, why not end it here, why not leave your reader salivating, desperate for He looks at me with flat, worried eyes, and I decide that he is kind of beautiful, that there is something impossibly (and marvelously) three-dimensional about him, that he has volume, even in this square on this screen in this electric world that flashes and zaps (and rezaps) and He says, I was taught to write in complete sentences, but his voice betrays no sarcasm or condescension, only a quiet curiosity; I can almost hear a voice inside his voice, a reedy voice murmuring, do you really submit unfinished essays, and, maybe, a voice in the voice in the voice, whispering, can you teach me how to submit unfinished essays, I would like to try, I am tired of conclusions, I am tired of Here is a person (Felix), here is a person who could be taught to write as the freest writers write, here is a person who yearns for incompleteness, here is an accomplice, thank God, thank God, thank Felix is waiting for me to say something, so I say, there are some professors at this university who are on our side — I monitor those strange eyes for signs of panic as I let my

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metastasize into our — who are on our side in the war against complete sentences, against the very concept of completeness, and if you would like to join our cause, you must not only submit this essay as it is, you must also begin to speak incompletely, to let your sentences trail off into implicit wind, quiet and suggestive and seductive and And Felix says, after a long pause, okay, I am ready to commit myself to incompleteness and give up periods and exclamation marks and question marks for ever and ever, until all that remains is the halfsentence, until the half-sentence becomes the sentence, until I smile, say, good, very, very Here is a Here is a Pope Francis candle with Here is a Pope Francis candle with Barack Obama’s paper face taped over the Sometimes I talk to the candle, out loud, like confession, and today I tell the candle that I have been suffering from intrusive thoughts about sentences that end, and I also tell the candle that my nightmares, in which human-sized question marks replace the schoolyard bullies of my youth, have only intensified, and the candle sits there, unlit, on the I leave the candle behind and go to Professor Kempt’s office hours — there are not, as I promised Felix, “some” professors at this university who are on our side; there is one professor, and her name is Monika Kempt, and she supposedly teaches German literature, though as far as I can tell she has not offered a course in seven years — and she greets me with, hello, Matthew, how are, and I sigh with pleasure, the pleasure of complicity, the pleasure of sharing incompleteness with another, the pleasure of the missing you, the pleasure Professor Kempt has eyes that could pierce ears; unpierced, unpierceable ears; lips that curl into an almost-smile when I read my essays, complete in their incompleteness, bursting with the possibility

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of

Today, in Professor Kempt’s unmarked basement office, I read my most recent essay, in which I contend, or start to contend, that Lydia Davis’ translation of Swann’s Way reflects her creative fixation on the very short story, and when I trail off mid-sentence — a microfictional sensibility that permeates — Professor Kempt applauds, then stops clapping a bit earlier than expected, as if to say, two can play at that She asks, what grade did you I do not want to admit that my professor gave me a C, so instead I tell her, I’ll put it this way, it was a lower grade than I should Progress comes slowly, but it always comes, even when, she says, nodding earnestly, then sips something from a mug striped blue and In other news, I say, I think I’ve convinced another student of the merits of our She grins, grins wider than I have ever seen her grin; we decide that we will stage a three-person protest on the central quad, the flattest part of this everywhere-flat campus, this fucking Zoom screen of a campus, that we will hand out flyers with a blurb that sublimates itself, devolves into a sort of senile silence, forgetting its end, pleasingly fractional, something like, STUDENTS: COMPLETE SENTENCES ARE DEATH; DEATH IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE; DO NOT REMAIN COMPLICIT IN I email Felix with the details, and he responds minutes later with a message so incomplete that I cannot even begin to understand what he is trying to say, and though I am almost fearful of the sudden passion with which he has thrown himself into this cause, I also feel immense pride, and I remind myself that Felix was my find, my recruit, my

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At dinner (chicken), my fear of death emerges with a rumble from somewhere in my gut, reminds me wordlessly that I am mortal, that sooner or later they will lower me into the ground, where I will rot into the bony shapes of periods and exclamation marks and Mouth paralyzed by the dryness of the meat, thoughts sticky with worry, I Now I am in bed, and I am telling myself that it is okay, that a life devoid of complete sentences is a life devoid of death, that those who renounce punctuation renounce death, that I am forever, forever, that I will never But when I slide into sleep, the dream returns, the dream in which I sit on the swing in the elementary school playground as a five-foot-tall question mark threatens to rub my face in the woodchips until my cheeks bleed and all I can taste is earth and the metallic redness of Felix and I get dinner at a restaurant two blocks north of campus; the restaurant’s name is Bodkin’s, which pleases us because it seems self-consciously incomplete, like, Bodkin’s what, or rather, what does Bodkin possess that goes unnamed on this flashing sign; the space is studded with out-of-sync televisions that are broadcasting, as we walk in, Corn’s run across the field at halftime; we sit in a corner without screens and revel in the invisibility of Corn; the menu takes the form of a list, only commas and semicolons, no sentences, and as we scan it with hungry roving eyes we talk about the protest, or really about other things under the pretense of talking about the protest; Buddhism and bugs and Georgia O’Keeffe and the sound of hail on an old car and what exists before we are born and bugs and Buddhism; finally the waiter arrives from some unseen place, lips like flowers, teeth like skulls, hair like

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AstroTurf, donning a pen-adorned apron and I order pasta, Felix orders fish, and we eat to the music of silverware and smacking, talking between bites, and a thing happens, a thing with rigatoni and cod and forks and tongues and half-banter, and the thing is that By dessert we are in love, madly and completely, but we cannot say that we are, not completely, not without finishing a sentence, not without sentencing ourselves to death, so instead we say, I love, I love, then, you are the one I, you are the one I, always a word missing, you or love or We kiss, briefly, beneath the flashing sign, then go our separate ways, Felix to one bed, me to another, where I Today turns to tomorrow; the protest comes; Felix and I meet Professor Kempt on the central quad with a pile of blackand-white flyers that read, STUDENTS: RESIST COMPLETENESS; REJECT PERIODS, EXCLAMATION MARKS, AND QUESTION Professor Kempt begins to chant, and as she chants Felix and I hand out flyers to passing students; mostly they are mused (either a- or be-), but sometimes they seem in- (either trigued or furiated); Professor Kempt is chanting; Professor Kempt is chanting in the morning light; Professor Kempt is going red while she chants; Felix and I pass out the last two flyers and kiss in this flat place to end all flat places as Professor Kempt slips out of English like it is a dress and begins to chant in German; Felix tells me, I love; I tell Felix, I love; Professor Kempt runs after a student, screaming, sentence-slaughterer, sentenceslaughterer, half-rabid; the student lets out a little shriek and takes refuge in the Latin American Studies building; Professor Kempt stands in front of the door, panting, hands on knees, muttering, sentence-slaughterer, sentence-slaughterer, as if admonishing herself, accusing herself, convicting herself; Felix

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and I decide that we will bear a child with no last name, rent an apartment with no bed, marry with no rings, all backwards, all incomplete; again I kiss Felix; again Felix kisses me; I tell Felix that I am scared to die, so scared, scared like a kid, an animal; Felix says, so am; we kiss; Professor Kempt watches, maybe, or maybe she has already disappeared, I do not bother to look; I ask myself whether semicolons are cheating; I ask Felix whether semicolons are cheating; Felix shrugs, says, can we just keep kissing in this fucking flat flat place, this plane, this paper; I say, okay, though I remain worried about semicolons, potential intruders, interlopers, marks that inspire wariness; morning turns to afternoon, afternoon to evening, evening to the usual nightmares; dream-Felix dares me to finish a sentence, laughing, laughing; I wake with an erection and an insatiable desire for the roundness of a period; in the shower, under scalding water, I say no, I find strength, I recommit myself to incompleteness; my skin goes red in front of the mirror and I marvel at how alive it is; the redness fades; my skin is left taut and white and reflected, marred (transitive property) by the old splotches on the glass; I shape my hair into a comma and They know about the protest, all of In the Zoom room, they fire me from my job as a writing tutor, lecturing me with hideously complete sentences, sentences so lashingly sentence-like that I would not dare to reproduce them here or anywhere, sentences that bite their tails, sentences that make my nose bleed, awful, awful The student-run newspaper publishes a sourceless article about what they call the Incompletenes Movemen, and all I can say is that they clearly do not understand the difference between a sentence and a word, which leads me to believe that they are stupid, though perhaps

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I tell the candle that if I die, I would like to be made into one of those plants that slowly kills flies; I would like my dirt to yield something brooding and carnivorous; the candle’s wax is half-gone and Obama is starting to peel; my confession feels frail, fraying; fraying and frail, too, are the wisps of white hair that emanate from the depths of Professor Kempt’s ears when I visit her to share the newspaper article about the protest; they are searching for light, I think, the wisps, but maybe the journalists, too; the wisps, shy, so shy, corn (Corn) silks trapped in a human frame; I ask Professor Kempt how to say corn in German, and for a second she forgets the word, but only for a Felix and I run south to a hill, and together we climb it, reaching the top just as the sun begins to I tell him what he already knows, which is that our protest will convince nobody, and he says, that’s okay, it’s special to share something with so few people, an idea, or a song, or He says, it’s like a secret you’re willing to reveal, but nobody is there to listen, and you decide that maybe it should stay a secret, maybe it should stay untold, maybe it Eyes catching the sinking sun, he says, Matthew, I love And I tell him, Felix, when I die, please do not And I tell him, Felix, I’m scared to And, in some sort of hill-trance, in the strange magic of the unflat moment, I tell him, Felix, Felix, I love you.

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HAIRBRUSH David Romanda

I hand her a hairbrush (her brush).

You have the floor, I say.

She says, Brush or no brush, you’re going to interrupt me before I can finish.

That’s bullshit, I say.

See? she says.

You finished your sentence, I say.

At least twenty seconds pass.

She’s holding the brush, but doesn’t speak.

I reach for the brush.

She shakes her head. She says, I’m not finished.

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BOUDOIR GHAZAL Alison Stone

To fortune cookies’ wisdom, add in bed.

They stayed married for fun they had in bed.

Rage fed by the kitchen – plates in sink, socks on the floor. Harder to stay mad in bed.

Suit traded for lingerie, chignoned hair freed. She looks like a perfume ad in bed.

He’d compromise on brains, religion, weight.

Deal-breakers – racism or bad in bed.

Pandemic perk – hours to walk among the crocuses or lounge, sky-clad, in bed.

Teens eat Tide pods, duct-tape themselves to chairs.

Remember when wax was a fad in bed?

Mirrors and our children tell us, You’re old.

The first-born is a high-school grad. In bed our bodies take us back to our true names Hungry Lovers, not Mom and Dad in bed.

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INSTEAD OF CHEWING A HOLE IN MY LIP & SWALLOWING THE BLOOD Kelly Weber

let’s say rain before dawn

say the dead fox in the meadow

come to tell me of it

say cloud and chest

heart

say purple gayfeather

and I draw your face

gently lift out each organ aside

beautiful

of my throat

and gut me

and weigh it in your hands

set each one

and pink glisten

say you cup my eyes

and call each one

say you cradle my lungs

say you breathe for both us

my skeleton waking up hitched

to your morning field

grass beneath the thunder

your little moon

your little lupine root

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say I ask you to tell me the skull

until I fall to pearl

slicking your fingers

hollow around

say you touch the softest part

say you slide a knife into my belly

say you

say you call me

your animal gentled to your voice

with a hand on my neck

say your words

give me back to myself

say our mothers call

asking if we’re okay

say needles

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line the fridge say a little red pools

like latches

inside a mouth

say today I do not chew my way of palm and mercy say the sky still singing

to my blood say today I am still alive

through the tender traps full of tongue

every way there is to hold

after tongue a pulse

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BEGINNERS Max Kr uger-Dull

Without Ivan in bed, I figure out I’m dreaming. The dream: I’m late for work and looking for pants. I only own two pairs of work pants, one of which split a week ago from the friction of my thighs rubbing together on bike rides. In the dream, I look for pants in my dresser. Then I look for pants in my childhood closet in North Carolina. And then I think, How’d I end up in North Carolina? I’m going to be late for work in New York. Oh, oh, I’m dreaming.

At work, I tell my colleagues about the dream during those intolerable minutes before a meeting starts when people trickle in and wait silently in their seats and stare at me and stare at each other like something is supposed to be happening: bonding maybe. We’re always supposed to be bonding. We’re always supposed to be melting into each other. I mention my dream as if I own more than two, now just one, pairs of work pants.

I keep meaning to buy more; I’ve had this job for five months.

I’ve been graduated for twenty. But I still only have a fading pair of caramel corduroys and a ripped white linen pant I thought would outlast its brother. “What’d you do when you realized you were dreaming?” my boss asks. He edits a photo of his wife on his phone. I say, “I don’t remember.” He says, “We noticed you need more pants,” and I feel exposed. I feel like hiding under the conference table. He smooths the skin on his wife’s forehead until she looks sketched. To me, the whole office looks sketched, shallow, like we could be washed away with water.

My bed’s still empty. As a boy, I imagined my future would

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involve an invariably full bed. I worried that, with all the body heat, I wouldn’t be able to keep the bed cold enough for sleep; I run warm; I wasn’t meant to grow up without air conditioning.

Three nights ago, Ivan disappeared from my bed with no explanation or warning. He took his clothes and his feet from their spot against mine. I shoot a photo of the empty bed and edit the sheets free of their wrinkles; maybe if Ivan sees the magically flat bed, he’ll consider me worth coming back to.

When I send the photo to him, I write, Without you, the bed is unhappy.

I’m perhaps a size 34x32 in pants. Or a 34x34. I’ve never taken the time to figure out exactly how long my legs have gotten; most days, I don’t care to know. When my corduroys start to fray at the crotch, I go to a cheap clothing store on my lunch break. I expect the clothes to have that awful new car smell. The best thing about living in Manhattan is that nothing smells new.

Everything smells, or should smell, informal and familiar. The store has 34x34s, and maybe 34x32s, but I don’t look too long.

I pick up a black baggy pant labeled ‘Essentials.’ I pay and rush to the street as if the air were attacking my skin. But why did I only buy one pair?

I take a day off work to look for Ivan at his favorite coffee shop and then at his sister’s apartment. She won’t tell me where he is. “He’s here,” I say. “Maybe,” she says. “Can you tell me why he disappeared?” I say. I feel like a kid with no ride home after school. And then I remember he’s always had an apartment of his own so I ring the buzzer there. But I don’t find him. He’s made himself missing. Around the corner from his building, I phone and leave a voicemail, sounding disoriented, like I’ve been lost in the woods for days. I call again and offer a

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massage. I don’t know why I feel a need for him in my life. I used to want a life made up of silly anecdotes and nothing else.

When I told Ivan that, he said, “How depressing.”

I don’t like being a person who doesn’t like work. Whenever I leave the office at the end of the day, I want to apologize for my gloomy demeanor.

For three years, I’ve sublet at $800 a month from an elderly woman with a rent-controlled apartment. She doesn’t care about money. If I had to pay her more, I might feel part of the working world.

Before this job began, I spent every day with Ivan for twenty months after meeting him outside my graduation from NYU. He’s since told me I’m the only person with a head shaped for a mortarboard. Ivan, a 26 year old who wants to be in his 30s, had a sister graduating that day. To get into Yankee Stadium where the commencement was being held, we had to wade through an hour of slow-moving security, which felt much too official for us. We were all beginners, still cutting the crusts off our sandwiches. Ivan moved along the outside of the security line to be with his sister Nina. I was in front of them but could sense Ivan’s noisy presence behind me. And then I heard Nina laugh as if I’d turned on the TV without meaning to. Ivan said, “My sister’s the best, the brightest.” I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me, but I turned toward him and said, “Okay, wonderful.” “She really is,” he said. “I’m glad,” I said and faced forward. Then I glanced back at him. And then again, feeling summoned. He looked so uninhibited, at first I thought because he wasn’t constrained by the line or by a heavy violet gown. But he naturally stood loose, comfortable, as if he loved wearing the

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world. The line continued on. Ivan continued to move behind me. I felt he was pointing me toward my future.

Ivan, whenever I applied for a job, would say, “It’s for your own good.”

I dream that Ivan buys me button-downs and bracelets but tells me, “Get your own pants.” He’s been gone for a month. When he used to work from my apartment, he lay on his stomach in my bed, propped up by his elbows, his laptop glowing in front of him. He made working look easy, costless. Before beginning this job, I’d look at Ivan and think, How bad can it be? And after starting, I’d come home to his diligence and thoroughness and think, I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. And I am fine. I’ve learned a new voice now, a work voice. Never breathy or uncertain. But without Ivan, I’m worried I’ll quit.

I’m assigned an important project at work. Someone on TikTok or Instagram found a backdoor to ordering a sold-out sweater and, overnight, 2,800 people paid for a product that can’t be fulfilled. So I’m to go through the company’s website and delete pages for the items no longer in stock. Luca, an intern, helps me with the task. Two hours into our work, he balances his phone on his forehead and tells me about the men he’s dating. There’s a man from Dubai, an extra in a new Mike Leigh film, a dentist, and a philosophy professor from Columbia. “Ooo, tell me about the professor,” I say. “He’s sweet,” he says, “and lets me hang out in his office.” As if I’m leashed by HR, I say, “Am I allowed to ask you about sexual things?” He says, “Sure, I don’t mind.”

I say, “You guys have sex in his office?” He says, “Of course we fuck in his office.” I turn from the computer and tell Luca about Ivan. “He almost immediately moved into my apartment,” I say;

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“I had no job and would sleep next to him as he worked from my place. Sometimes I’d distract him with my body or by telling him my dreams.” I say, “It felt so outside-of-time. Like we were pressed together, floating somewhere private.” As I speak, I imagine Luca and I are somewhere beyond the constraints of this office: on the other side of the windows or tucked underneath the rug.

Then Ivan is back. I come into the apartment after a more or less steady and straightforward day of working to find Ivan on the bed after six weeks gone, on his stomach like a blithe surfer, spreadsheets open, typing, a stack of his clothes hanging out beside the mattress as if he’s negotiating his return with the room instead of me. The door shuts and he looks over his shoulder at my backpack heavy with my work laptop. Then he looks up at me, a warm but unsatisfying expression. I sit on the bed. He says, “How’s work?” I say, “Where’ve you been?” He says, “Don’t ask me that. You’re just a baby.” I pinch him. Then I rest my head on his sleek back. I hope I don’t weigh him down.

That night Ivan takes me on a walk around the neighborhood.

We don’t talk about where he was. He leads me past a church and a dog park and a bakery with good lime tarts. He guides us, although I’ve lived here for five years. For the first time, I think of Ivan as a man who is both pushing me forward and pulling me back. I am a coin he shoves into vending machines and then yanks out by a string attached to my waist to keep in his pocket for later. I ask, “Do I seem older to you than when we met?”

Tonight, I’m his little boy. And tonight he’ll ridicule me for being his little boy.

The day before my college graduation, I biked the entire

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perimeter of Manhattan and stared up through salty lashes at the commanding buildings I’d never before thought much about. When I got home, I applied to eighteen jobs with the flash of energy that comes from finishing a stage of life. Those were the first jobs I ever tried to get. And had I really tried to get them? As I sent around my mild resume, I knew I was only applying with fractions of myself. I was putting forward just my hand or just my shoulder or just the bottom sliver of my brain. Nothing more was possible. But that day, I did like the idea of myself in a powerful building, although I never cared for the thought before or since. That day, I did think I should be cannonballing away from college. And I did think maybe I could be good at work because I had no idea what work really was.

Two weeks after Ivan’s return, he walks me to work. I ask about his job, which we’ve briefly talked about before as if it were a marvel I’d never experience. His job is going well, he says.

That’s all he says. Then he asks if I want my backpack carried.

“So why’d you disappear?” I ask. My drowsy-looking, geldedlooking citymates wobble into office buildings and I come to realizations the rest of the world has already accepted. I am late to learn that the world needs unhappy people to function. I am late to learn that there are fewer unhappy working people than I once thought. Ivan asks, “Can you really handle knowing why I disappeared?” I walk ahead of him–I lead him–and say, “Of course I can.” So he tells me I was making him sad. “Okay, sad,” I say; my voice sounds deep, crisp, a taut, dependable rope that any businessperson would trust to guide them forward. “I left,” he says, “because you have a bad relationship to work.” “I know I do,” I say. And he says, “It’s like you’re still too small for society.”

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In college, I studied anthropology. But I knew I’d never be curious or creative enough to make use of the degree. Even then, the working world waved to me, placing a sticker on my mothy t-shirts, marking me for later.

At home I watch Ivan work. I used to get confused by columns and rows. Which is the column? But I’m a spreadsheet user now and never mix them up. Ivan is fiddling with a map-like spreadsheet. It’s color coded, directional, complex. He’s clicking through columns like untold knowledge is buried there. But then he opens a different tab and searches for song lyrics from his youth. I catch him humming a song that must be “SexyBack” because those are the lyrics he’s reading. Before I started this job, I never noticed how Ivan worked or didn’t work.

How dumb must I have been to think he devotedly fondled spreadsheets for hours, no distractions, no breaks. I start to hum too, which annoys him. He toggles back to his spreadsheet.

The water stops working in my apartment so we go to Ivan’s for three days. I haven’t been allowed inside before. His place looks exactly like mine: a tiny studio with bare walls, insubstantial furniture, and an ugly, white fridge. When I see how young the apartment makes him feel, I say, “If it’ll help, we can pretend this place isn’t yours.”

I am stupefied when, just days after my eight-month mark with the company, I’m told I’ll get a raise, six-thousand dollars more, and an increase in vacation time too, one week more, all for “being a hard worker.” This must be some sneaky form of reverse psychology taught to MBAs, I think at first, where the worst employee gets the biggest raise in a rashly reasoned

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attempt at motivation. I have no cause to believe I’m a good worker. Am I a good worker? I show up early but start late. I sit stiller in meetings now. I’ve become less opposed to talking about my job. Am I a good worker? No, I’m not a good worker.

For my birthday, the company buys me dress socks, which my boss leaves on my desk like a new project for me to tackle.

“Thank you,” I say and mean it. I had no dress socks. My work shoes had been etching cuts into my bare ankles. I still only have two pairs of pants, my essential corduroys and my essential Essentials. I’m always on the verge of buying more.

It’s the final day with Ivan in my life. We’re about to fight, split up–I can sense it. Our futures are tugging on each other, hacking at each other. An hour ago, as Ivan hid his embarrassed gaze, I asked a waiter at a restaurant that was posing as a diner if they had chocolate milk. The waiter: “What’d you say?”

Me: “Do you have chocolate milk?” The waiter: “When I say ‘What’d you say’ that means we don’t have it.” Ivan apologized for my classlessness. “Don’t be so mean,” I said to Ivan; “I’m not an idiot. It looks like a diner that would have chocolate milk.”

He said, “You should never be ordering chocolate milk.” And now we’re at a party thrown by his company. He introduces me to no one. I hold onto his arm so I can remember his arm when I’m without an arm to hold onto. We talk to his boss. “Ivan is an upsettingly hard worker,” I say to laughter. I’ve learned to breathe in rooms like this. The walls no longer squeeze me and tripping’s less of a hazard. Do I still need him? Then Ivan taps my shoulder and fades into the party. I can’t find him among the button-downs and loafers. But am I trying to? I flirt with people. I don’t think I’m networking, but I might be. And then I feel a severing; Ivan’s left, I think. He feels far away, I think.

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His clothes will be gone again from the edge of my bed. I leave the party too. I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. I feel fine, like my world is still the same size. Tomorrow I have a meeting that will require my big, strong voice. So I bike home, my dress socks getting sweatier and sweatier, my corduroys getting thinner and thinner.

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SLOTMACHINES4DUMMIES Andre w Blake

After my Dad, who taught me how to hunt snakes

No one is coming but I’m all-in cashed out on a Tuesday night.

Well, so much for epiphanies because I prefer superstition– The neighbor’s cat goes stray again and always slinks away.

There will be July and more stomach aches.

Not that what’s strung taut will recoil with the force of a tooth knocked loose to the door knob my sister slammed it hard now I’m lithping through my mithing tooth.

She is deserted outside a casino but what a topthy-turvy world it’d be without my thithter or money!

Say cheeseeee oh hello debtors’ jail on the horizon surely I do not look back.

My father stares down the barrel. So do I. The snake writhes

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then it does until it doesn’t. Yes, the underbelly is warm.

Who said it’s all just handprints on cave walls?

I did, maybe.

I’m going on elsewhere, Pa. This desert is no-man’s land yet here we are making a hearth where it’s stranded.

Consider how loneliness conjures faces from the dark, how I am cactus lost among cacti; the difference cannot be determined.

I just cling to the fabrications of my own longing like a stray dog.

You can only break a piggy bank once So I smash it and buy a new one These are trick candles blowing out trick candles I will go broke soon

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CASCADE Aaron Fagan

The coin I carry under My tongue in death, Sandwiched between Two biscuits and honey, Appears when I come To along the riverbank Where my shoes were Taken off and put back On backwards to confuse Whatever might try to Return along my tracks, Wash my hair with mud, And know none of these Things ever happened.

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the columbia review

WINSOME AND LOSESOME IN TEN BACKWARD STEPS Lynn Schmeidler

Which of my twins was my favorite it was impossible to say. Like choosing bucket or water. Start at the end.

10.

At the end, Winsome had three careers and 2.1 children, and Losesome had 2.1 marriages and three children. The empty nest I feathered with a loom, a lackadaisical lover, and my husband’s foibles. Where was my moxie? I looked all over my foible-feathered nest with its yarny loom and too-young imaginary lover. My moxie was gone. If I could summon Winsome and Losesome from their own twin lives on the other coast could I ever be their Mutterputter again? Maybe not the old, clumsy Mutterputter, but a little better Mutterputter?

9.

At the cousin’s wedding, my 20something Winsome and Losesome danced together in perfect conjugation as if they were the yin-yang of catering halls. I stared at their perfection, resisting the urge to video or photograph or acknowledge them in any disgracefully motherly way.

“You Winsome! You Losesome!” I wanted to call out to them. “Where’d you learn to dance like that?”

Instead, I did what any mother of independent adult children attracting lots of impressed attention ought to do. I

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modestly looked the other way. And there, beyond the table where my husband sat hunched over a plate of salmon, stood my lackadaisical lover leaning against a doorframe, smiling.

“Listen to me, my lackadaisical lover,” I said.

“Harry,” he said.

I frowned.

“My name,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” I said, though I had not realized his name was Harry, and in fact would likely never have taken him as my lover had I known his name was Harry, because I abhorred that movie. “Here is the thing,” I continued. “The thing about you. It is impossible to know if your LACKADAISICAL -ness is purposeful and an attempt at being misterioso or accidental and a symptom of a deficit of attention. This makes you an unlikeable character. And the thing about unlikeable characters… they alienate people.”

My lackadaisical lover looked at me with those eyes.

“What’s a man to do?” he asked.

“Find an arc and bend it hard,” I told him. My lackadaisical lover looked distractedly over my head at the dance floor, and I turned to see a handsome young stranger approach the twins and offer Winsome his hand. Losesome, who was used to such gestures, turned her attention from the dance floor to the catering hall, and as her sister clutched the handsome stranger and danced off with him, searched the room with her irrefutable eyes. When, briefly, they alighted on mine, I tried for the peace sign of expressions: one part sympathy, one part encouragement, one part grief. But Losesome turned from me to my lackadaisical lover, who rushed the dance floor and waltzed her away.

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8.

I found my lackadaisical lover in the supermarket a few months earlier.

“Mutterputter!” he said. I told him it was high time he called me by my name. He squinted and tilted his head to the side.

“Sally.” I reminded him.

“Sally!” he said. “How are you?”

I told him Winsome and Losesome had moved to L.A. and my heart had gone with them.

My lackadaisical lover made an experimental face. Then he said, “Carry me over this threshold my groom.”

I had never carried anyone over any threshold, and he had never before called me his groom, but he had the lips of Jim Morrison and the thighs of Mercury, so I bent forward, and he hopped on my back. I grabbed him behind the knees and carried him into the woods behind the supermarket where I dropped him onto the leafy ground and pulled off his pants, and we happily ever after-ed until the sun went down and we got hungry, and my lackadaisical lover said he had to get back to the supermarket where he hoped his half-full cart was still waiting.

7.

Winsome and Losesome applied to and were accepted at the same university where they roomed together for four years. I worried that they were not branching out. I wanted them to grow wide branches with fine needles and thick bark, respectively. I told them I did not know why they chose to live together when there were so many other people in the world to learn you could live without.

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“We reject the hypothesis,” said Winsome.

“We accept the worry, Mutterputter,” said Losesome.

At their commencement dinner, as soon as dessert arrived, their heads tilted toward one another and they broke into song: Today is our day. We are off and away. We have legs! We have brains! We are breaking our chains. You may have made us but cannot upbraid us, if after our meals, we up with our heels, and onward we run toward our gains!

They’d clearly rehearsed as they employed choreographed hand motions and upper body moves. I was not sure whether to laugh at their facetiousness or cringe at their puerility. Had they not been gorgeous galore, I would have lectured them on the gradations of graduation. As it was, I understood my part in the production of daughterhood, so I smiled and finished my cake.

6.

“Isn’t Winsome’s outfit so clutch, Mutterputter?” said Losesome as they dressed for the New Year’s Eve party their last year of boarding school.

“Yes, so clutch, but please don’t call me that.”

“Losesome is slaying in that red dress, huh Mutterputter?” said Winsome, curling iron in hand.

Slaying, okay, but I did not like answering to Mutterputter. I preferred Mom. Or Mum. Or Mummy.

Winsome had started calling me Mutterputter in middle school, and then Losesome picked it up. Afterwards, my husband also began calling me Mutterputter and my brothers too. Even my lover called me Mutterputter. It sounded like a name you’d call someone you both loved and hated, and maybe loved to hate or hated to love. In any event, I didn’t much like it, but it was like that weed that grew along the wall of the house that I’d thought

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at first might be an interesting wildflower, so I’d let it alone, and by the time it had grown large and ugly and I finally went to yank it out, it was so thick and rooted so well, it was impossible to pull from the ground, and even if I cut it down every now and again, it only grew back stronger.

5.

(

Every weekend I drove the four hours to Winsome and Losesome’s boarding school, bringing them puddings and pickles and puppies to pet. Winsome outgrew her pants so quickly I brought two sizes with me each visit. Losesome kept leaving her winter coat places, so I brought her blankets and capes and stoles and muffs. I brought notes for their teachers explaining their strengths: Winsome can calm storms and find buried treasure by echolocation. Losesome implants poetry in even the most cold-hearted and has a remarkably high tolerance for pain.

Between my visits, Winsome and Losesome sent messages.

Winsome sent memes: a picture of two forks: it was the best of tines; it was the worst of tines. Losesome sent texts: “Now I know why you told me never to put bras in the washing machine. ” 4.

At the 8th grade parent teacher conference, I received the reports. It appeared the sisters were awfully smart. The teachers could not keep up with their needs, said the principal who I had not expected to join the meeting where we sat on plastic chairs at individual desks looking awkward and individual.

“Winsome requires greater opportunities for

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independence,” said her teacher nodding a little with each word.

“Losesome demands more responsibility,” said the other teacher shaking her head slowly side to side.

“What they are in need of is a higher standard than we can provide here,” said the principal. “Boarding school,” she said flattening her palm on the table.

I thought she said, boring school, and though I was surprised at how easily she disparaged her institution, I agreed.

She made a call, and off they went, their matching worlds packed into two trunks.

3.

All through their childhood, Winsome wrote plays and collected stray children to act them out; Losesome hunted squirrels and built labyrinths. The year they turned ten, they switched names and places. Winsome became Losesome—hid behind her smooth dark hair, left her clothes on the floor, while Losesome became Winsome—directed her fair freckled face to a fresh audience of admirers. They looked at one another and saw themselves. That year I did not know how to think of them.

“Think of them as Fruit of My Loins,” said my husband. “Think of them as Go Out and Play,” said my mother. “Don’t think of them,” said my lackadaisical lover.

2.

Their seventh summer, they fell terribly ill. We were on vacation. Winsome had something brewing from the ferry ride out, and by the time we’d made it to the hotel, Losesome had it too. We took them to the travelers’ clinic.

“They will be fine,” the clinicians said. “Plenty of soup and

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tea.”

But Winsome wouldn’t eat, and Losesome grew gray. They huddled in their shared hotel bed, peering out at the harbor through the window. The next day was the Queen’s first visit to the province in 50 years, so I hoisted Winsome on my shoulders and my husband lifted Losesome on his in the hopes that a glimpse of the royal procession would cheer them, but Winsome only said, “What, that old Lady there?” and Losesome vomited on her father’s head.

On the phone, the pediatrician recommended immediate chest X-rays, so we returned to the clinic where the photographs showed Winsome’s left lung and Losesome’s right were each entirely white. The rest of the vacation Winsome and Losesome spent in the hospital where doctors worked to darken their lungs back to health. I slept in the parent dorm with the other mothers of sick children exchanging guilty, regretful messages with my husband.

Winsome and Losesome’s attachment to one another was both essential and tricky. If one began to improve and was removed from the ICU, the condition of the other drastically worsened. I hovered over them in my sterile gown and booties.

Winsome inhaled loudly. Losesome sighed.

“Until they have both recovered, neither will be discharged,” the doctors said. This was a province that paid for people to stay in hospital until they were cured. It was six days and six nights before we could take them home.

1.

Winsome and Losesome rushed ahead of me down the path in their red and pink parkas, sharing a plush happiness with each other and the snowy day. Complementary and

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interactive, the whole of them greater than their separateness.

“Wait for me!” I shouted as they ran ahead through the trees. “I have treats!” I was carrying a heavy bag filled with juice boxes and trail mix. Also hope and love and days.

“Hurry up!” Winsome said to her sister, pulling her fast by the sleeve. Losesome looked back at me, hesitating. Then turned and ran off with her sister. I tripped on a root and fell on my knee. Already the twins were out of sight.

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Angela Ball’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The North American Review, The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Grand Street, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her sixth and most recent book of poetry is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). She teaches in the Center for Writers, part of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.

CONTRIBUTORS

Brandon Rushton is the author of The Air in the Air Behind It (Tupelo Press, 2022), which was selected by Bin Ramke for the Berkshire Prize. A recipient of awards from Gulf Coast and Ninth Letter, his poems appear widely in publications like The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Bennington Review, and Passages North. His essays on environment and place appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Terrain. org, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (Ohio University Press 2020), and have been listed as notable by Best American Essays. He lives, writes, and teaches in Michigan.

Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind studies comparative literature at Yale and serves as editor-in-chief of the Yale Literary Magazine. His stories and essays appear in The Drift, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and West Branch.

David Romanda’s work has appeared in places such as The Columbia Review, The Louisville Review, and Puerto del Sol. His book is Why Does She Always Talk About Her Husband? (Blue Cedar Press, 2022).

Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan.

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Alison Stone is the author of nine full-length collections, Informed (NYQ Books, forthcoming), To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023), Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Masterplan, a book of collaborative poems with Eric Greinke (Presa Press, 2018), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks.

Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award. She was Writer in Residence at LitSpace St. Pete. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. https:// alisonstone.info/ Youtube and TikTok – Alison Stone Poetry.

Kelly Weber (they/she) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (forthcoming December 2023). They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Pleaides, Waxwing, Gulf Coast Online, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University. More of their work can be found at kellymweber.com.

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Max Kruger-Dull holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Litro Magazine, Roanoke Review, Quarterly West, The MacGuffin, Hunger Mountain Review, among other outlets. He lives in New York with his boyfriend and two dogs.

For more, please visit maxkrugerdull.com.

Andrew Forrest Joseph Blake studies creative writing and religion at Columbia University. He likes to grind fresh pepper when he cooks cacio e pepe (thank you Diamond for your recipe wisdom). Sometimes he reads philosophy to feel refined and ends up going nonverbal, which is kind of funny. Hopefully he’ll be able to save up for a beat-up pick up truck and drive through Kentucky. Otherwise his ongoing novel about the impossibility of being Elsewhere will never get written. Until then, he continues on against that cruel thrum—what a laugh it all is! Check out some of his prior prose Can’t Help But Look in 4x4 Magazine 2023.

Aaron Fagan is the author of four poetry collections including A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020) and Pretty Soon (Pilot Press, 2023).

Lynn Schmeidler is the author of Half-Lives which was selected by Matt Bell as the winner of the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction and will be published March 2024. Schmeidler’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, KR Online, Conjunctions, Georgia Review, The Southern Review and other venues. She is the winner of BOMB’s 2023 fiction prize, the recipient of a Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction and has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches creative writing online.

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THE

COLUMBIA

REVI E W

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Editors-in-Chief Udonne Eke-Okoro, Jonathan Truong, Judy Xie

Managing Editors

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