Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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ART II ANTHONY GOICOLEA ii Pool Pushers v Tree Dwellers vii Dead Forest viii Boys' Room xii Still Life with Pig DINOS & JAKE CHAPMAN iii Fuck Face ix Tragic Anatomies xiii DNA Zygotic xv Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model (enlarged x1000) II II Editor's Note rankl)', it's hard to believe the number of pigs in this issue. Every time there was an opportunit)T, we seemed to sa)', but how might we get another pig in there? Can we bring in Charlotte's Web? Though one of the editors noted, "I love pigs - they're delicious," many don't even eat The Pork. For instance, I was raised by a macrobiotic vegetarian who went so far as to strike night-shade vegetables from our fridge due to their resemblances to flesh. No eggplant, tomato, or avocado. In teenaged rebellion I ate Whopper Juniors and left the receipts in the key dish, in my pants pocket, in the drawer with playing cards and batteries. Once, after a particularly nasty fight I cooked bacon in my mother's iron skillet -left the residue to cake, her next com pone was my delicious secret and resulted in stomach cramps for the whole family. But mostly my diet has been free of sentients. Another editor's favorite picture of herself is standing next to a giant hog in Ecuador. She wanted to use it on her license. Another claimed that even the smell of ham caused her stomach to wrench. And yet after reading James Doyle's poem about the banquet and Thylias Moss's about clarified butter we found ourselves wanting more. What we need is a pig on a spit - can we make it turn as the reader flips through pages? The idea was that each stof)T, poem, photo, and essay would be a part of a massive and growing feast - the kind where something bleeds then gets slow-cooked to perfection over lightly smoking hickory or cherry. There are shifts to tend the fire. It is only the way we carne to understand this, Columbia's 42nd Issue. We set out with no thematic directive, put no constraints on what content to look for. There are essays about Rwanda, a good dog, teaching, whoring in Phuket; stories about camping, old friends, growing up, and getting the hell out; poems about fashion, a goat, Manhattan, and quietly watching; art that is wetter than words, seas of bodies, a town in the trees, and portraits of men growing young. And a lot of pigs. Thank you for picking up this issue, for subscribing, for flipping through at the library: It is all for you dear reader, enjoy the feast. Very Truly Yours,
II When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake - not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran in to the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail. II - LARRY MCMURTRY from Lonesome Dove \ by Marsha Recknagle so m e f e a 5 t When You Walk from This Room he students crowded around a conference table made of the same particle-board brown as the Ouija board I'd touched lightly, but often, as a child. When first I walked into the classroom, I was irritated that there were no windows, no space for me to pace around in my cowboy boots, swirl my gauzy skirts. My teaching techniques - swirl, pace, match the momentum of my thoughts with hands flying as if I were in a game of charades would be restricted this semester by setting. I looked up at the blank faces: John with the curly hair and sneaky eyes, Megan, skin luminous, Brenna, her teeth and the whites of her eyes startling in contrast to her olive skin. Shiny sleek seals, I thought, and imagined tossing a beach ball into the air, saw it in my mind's eye - round and rolling and colorful, creating a stir, like my words that I hoped would bounce from student to student, forming balloons of ideas above their heads. I touched the table with my fingertips, saw the traces of my prints on the cheap surface, thought of making a mark in the room. Tried, by tapping my fingers on the tabletop, not only to predict the future but form it. Rock/Paper/Scissors. The class is destined to hatch like a brood during the gestation period we call a semester. Brazen or beat-down, all in the future, up to me, up to us, how we nurture, what we need.
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Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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