Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Pomegranate Season in the Underworld
This is the difference I am trying to name. The pomegranate on the shelf and the pomegranate on the newspaper. The fruit polished for display, and the fruit cracked open in a living room. The version of a place that…
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Form as Historical Memory: On D. M. Aderibigbe’s “82nd Division”
Are elegies fundamentally love poems? Or are love poems always tinged with elegy, knowing they contain their own ending?
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The Godbrother
Candida founded the agency; she was a middle-aged powerhouse with a keen literary eye, taste, and a no-nonsense air. She’d ushered Joseph Heller through the 22 rejections of what was then called “Catch-18” before she found him a publisher. She…
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Precisely Flesh
Everyone I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast, that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter, overflowing.
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Logan Takes a Lit Test
I ask that my parrot remind me how to breathe. He complies. I take the cue from him as always. Thank you, he says, I say. Papa telling me when I was a child, inhale, inhale, inhale. The village doctor…
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What Is Freedom: Eileen Myles
There’s only one freedom and that is freedom in Palestine and the occupation ending. Then we can talk about freedom anywhere. All our freedoms today are failed because of this nation held captive on their own land.
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Temporary Utopias: Resisting Machine Mind and Cognitive Surrender with Eleni Sikelianos
“There’s a research element to many of my books, not just reading or looking into the archives, in the vein of investigative poetics, but also sensory investigation. Lately, I’ve been calling the books “ancestral encounters.” That seems to cover a…
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Do the Thing: A Conversation with Emily Rapp Black
“I feel more despair now than I did ten years ago; the global uncertainty, mostly. But part of being an artist is to say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” To me, that’s the truth of everything. People ask,…
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To Dig a Home
I baby but do not cry. At night, I wander the shores looking for my tears in the sand. My footprints, just skid marks in a desert
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Self. Pleasure.
After all that foreplay, I’m brooding—my feathers, ruffled. Then, the me who wants me takes me to bed, undresses me slowly, covers me in kisses. I’ve always had a way with me: I know what I want and how to…
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What Is Freedom: Roz Chast
Freedom is about choice. You have your Classic Coke or Pepsi and your Diet Coke or Pepsi and your Coke Zero (my personal favorite!) or Pepsi Zero Sugar. All of those come with or without caffeine. Plus there are the…