BOYFRIENDS: Clay


I MET CLAY WHEN he played the town drunk in our school production of Strindberg’s lost play, Veisalgia. We’d sit backstage and I’d coat his lashes with mascara because he was born with so little. The drama teacher favored him, showering him with roses after every performance. On Fridays, we’d suck on licorice drops and make out in the clover fields as the other boys whistled and gathered for the foxhunt. I took him home one weekend after he insisted we crash a Kennedy wedding but instead we went quahogging and had sex in an old dinghy named, “Merman’s Nipple”

Breaking Point: His deepening friendship with a hulking lacrosse player named Edan.

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STORIES: Shelagh Power Chopra’s work appears in FRIGG, failbetter, The Good Men Project, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She runs the website, drunkonjunk.com: a fictitious account of a relationship gone wrong. She lives on Cape Cod and is working on a novel. DRAWINGS: Kara Jansson's iPhone & iPad drawings have been published in online publications including The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, WNYC, The Outlet and Used Furniture Review. Her work was recently included in the exhibition "Stylectrical" at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. She is a founding board member of the International Association of Mobile Digital Artists and Co-Director of the art collective, Coalfather Industries.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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