The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
This brings our 2013 National Poetry Month Project to a close. I’d like to thank all 34 poets who trusted us with their work and all the people who read, appreciated, and forwarded their work along on Facebook and Twitter, via email and word of mouth.
...more30 days hath Septemnber, April June and November, but National Poetry Month hath as many days as we want it to hath.
______________________ studio practice with italicized Michael Ondaatje quote
...moreSome Philosophies of Orbit
...moreHere at The Rumpus, we’re never satisfied with the 30 days of National Poetry Month. We like to stretch it out a little.
...moreThe Qiana Shirt, 1976, by Emilio Pucci
...moreAubade With Mosquito Bites
...moreBut She Wasn’t From My South
i’ve been trying to recall nostalgia, how
hidden within deep memory they call it
saudade, its origin portugal, no i’ve never been
lost to a lover, sadly misled, discarded,
Letters from Saint Francis
...moreRuminations on cud from five of my fullest stomachs
...moreThe Sturdiness
For a long time I was thinking that I had to do more.
The way a dancer looks away from the camera.
...moreBrandon Bryant: MQ-1 Predator Sensor Operator
He lives in Montana now. Talks to German magazines, plus
Canadian radio shows. He coaches soccer, still has to tell us
everything. How it works, how many screens. How many fly
one drone. Fourteen, and two.
Darth Vader, King Laios (Fill Out Their Applications as, Across the Lobby, Genghis Khan’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” Ringtone Plays): Fathers of the Year
...moreSober Lullaby
Oak tree in time this story makes no recognition
A photo will not distance music caught in a wind
That entered the room where the child slept
Ghosts
Ghosts who I loved wandering through the glass doors and the turnstiles
without seeing me walking swiftly behind them.
Billy Divine
The American Primeval
is not the green garden we think we’ve lost
it’s stark white cloudless sky
above a cinder-gray shack
Seven Confessions: A Chapbook
...moreCafé Space
Here comes backwash from apocalypse
gamey as last night’s monastery potluck.
Did you have the goat bleating from the roof
of a floating house, its song as old as warning?
Swim Lesson No. 3
Syracuse, New York
June 2012
I can’t find my bearings in this landlocked country,
riverless and briny. Not waterless exactly but curveless
and motionless, a chlorophyll kingdom. A viney
Marilyn Nelson, today’s featured poet, wrote a series of ghazals to accompany some images by illustrator Philippe Lardy, who gave us permission to include a copy of the painting which inspired Nelson’s poem.
Sawed-Through Link
...moreTo Biespiel From United Flight 1037
— Greensboro to Atlanta
Dear Brother —
I used to think of death all the time,
And then for a time I didn’t, or didn’t try to,
And now I do not expect to die on this flight
Above the skies from the Carolinas to Georgia,
Where, if I were to die, I would not have chosen Atlanta
What with its bad moods and old alchemies.
To Mercury, In Retrograde
This ointment isn’t helping.
This clinic isn’t free.
The nurse’s favorite movie
is Penitentiary III.
Elizabeth Bradfield wrote the first poem we published here on The Rumpus, so I’m pleased to have her kick off this year’s National Poetry Month project. Elizabeth’s poem is more than just a written piece, however: it’s a collaboration between her and video artist Demet Taspinar.
...more