Columns
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Five Poems
I am the Holy Ghost! You are Entangled! Mostly embarrassed of my dead father,I was below the fig,looking up, open-mouthed,following the bees feastingthe fruit to ruin, slogging through the funk lifting from the floorfrom what had fallen; it was the…
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Someone Else Will Save Us: A Conversation with Kim Fu
“ It is difficult and overwhelming to think about what’s happening to the whole world at scale and the forces that are at play. But telling the story of one person and the points at which they are interacting with…
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The Part That Hurts
She had been a good friend when she had to be, and somewhere in all of this time we’d forgotten how to speak to one another. Now, she has come to me in this early stage of grief. I wasn’t…
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The Pride 30
At The Rumpus we pride ourselves (ha!) on celebrating queer voices year-round. Genuine inclusion has always been a guiding principle for this magazine and Debbie and I are proud to continue publishing in that tradition. In recent years, younger people…
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Parasocial Connection & Dinner As Organizing Principle: A Conversation with Krys Malcolm Belc
“There was the loneliness of losing in-person socializing at work [during the early days of the pandemic]. And then when I was sent home–because I was not an “essential worker” at my job… there was a screen now, between me…
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Two Poems
Equations You make them up,the tiny alliancesbetween having kidsand having trees,between kidsin the trees andtheir handspainted intothe disappearingshape of light.You make theconnection betweena lot of hormonescoursing through you,a lot of chaos at the door.Between the fishgone limp and thechild in…
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Books that Made Me Gay: “The Vampire Lestat” by Anne Rice
Decades before Stephenie Meyer shook up high schools worldwide with her anemic, Mormon vampires and years before Buffy ever kissed Spike, Anne Rice, the spiritual godmother to each beautifully insane individual to ever post horny slash fic on AO3 and…
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The Sisters of Song, Myth, Poetry, Prayer: A Conversation with Maya Salameh
“I think the places in this book (especially Damascus and San Diego) are reconstituted in that they are mangled in my recitation of them, and I allow them their mangledness. By insisting on the presence of Arabic on the page,…
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A Reclaiming and a Reckoning: A Conversation with Diana Whitney
“So what do we do with the rage? We can make meaning from it. We can shape it into some form where it’s manageable, whether that’s a form on the page in a poem, whether it’s a story we can…
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On Natalie Shapero’s “Stay Dead”
In Shapero’s words, “everyone is a worker.” If many of life’s actions are performances done for payment, so that even oxygenation is “a service / the woods provide,” then art forms like acting, painting, and writing are also determined by…
