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National Poetry Month: Magdalena
Magdalena was shaping small pools of water in pockets of stone. A bare-faced ibis sounded his quintuplet alarm when you turned to me to say you’d stopped the medications one month ago. The head pain, back pain, tremors, the cytomegalovirus—too…
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Infestation
Everyone knew the housing projects had rats, but when Liliya first saw one she was lying on her mattress on the floor, looking at her phone until a sudden, furtive movement caught her eye. The rat was only a few…
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The First Book: Avery Curran
“For me, writing a first novel was defined by having to accept that I was learning how to do it as I went, and that is a very disagreeable experience if you, like me, are one of the world’s great…
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
so that the sounds of daily living become a part of the ritual as public as private as life but also so that when I sit in the dark on the couch paying the bills my face illuminated by the…
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The Age of Nightmares
My son’s voice came through on the monitor. I waited a second, eyes closed, not losing hope he’d fall back asleep, even though that hardly ever happens. He’s two years old; they say it’s the age of nightmares. Almost every…
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
in a woodstove. Some warmth returns to my life, some looking-after feeling, some protective force for what is tender, vulnerable and lost in me until now. What a joy
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To Insist on Loving and on Being Loved: A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy
“ I was writing poems all the while but writing poems and making a book are different matters altogether. The real question is what it took for me to organize these poems into a collection that held the energy I…
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Horror as a Crucible for Connection in Zefyr Lisowski’s “Uncanny Valley Girls”
Horror is a genre of solitude
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National Poetry Month: A Day in the Life
I paid my friends to step on their hands with stilettos The gift of stigmata
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Always Watching from the Roof
Below the red roofs, a new strip of pale earth cuts across the hill where last year olive trees still stood. The fence has crawled lower, closer to our side, and from up here it looks like a fresh wound…
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Invasive Species
Shuko had such an imagination, even for a child, that no one paid attention to her remarkably intuitive understanding of the new species, not when she woke up screaming from nightmares in sweaty sheets, and not when she flat-out refused…
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![National Poetry Month: “WHEN PRAYER DIDN’T AWAY THE GAY, MY DAD TAUGHT ME HOW TO PLAY DOOM ON THE FAMILY COMPUTER [Golden Shovel]”](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pic-Ty-Raso.jpeg)
National Poetry Month: “WHEN PRAYER DIDN’T AWAY THE GAY, MY DAD TAUGHT ME HOW TO PLAY DOOM ON THE FAMILY COMPUTER [Golden Shovel]”
I have this dream where I am the last person alive on a two- dimensional earth, my body 3D like a fruit, and start- ing to inside-out itself, until my gut is a skirt and my DOOM- sense is like…