The Rumpus Inaugural Poems
Official inaugural poems are a strange beast. There have only been five of them and the one we recognize as the first, Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” wasn’t composed for…
Poems
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Where were you when the world broke?
Not in your echoing womb, to scream at you across your fields to wake up, not part of your denial that Earth is burning, dehydrated, suffocating on itself— I stood…
Saturday Rumpus Poetry: Three Poems by Connie Voisine
Strewn is a finger in the soil, the seed / pressed through, too deep, anxious and why.
Sunday Rumpus Poetry: Four Poems by Ladan Osman
I want to walk into a field at night, close our eyes and mouths / so the searchlights can’t find us.
National Poetry Month Day 31: Sandra Simonds
Confessional Poem I fucked your husband and I don’t feel __bad enough for the bourgeoisie. My sexuality roughly translating into teenage vampire, __my blood a pop song programmed to some…
National Poetry Month Day 30: Sophie Klahr
Slant which codes the luminous tree at your gate which broad night renders its own wild leap
National Poetry Month Day 27: Shane McCrae
Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park -For Tamir Rice I hold an apple in my hand on set It is or ain’t…
National Poetry Month Day 26: Beth Bachmann
nectarine & leather (riot) we said they’d never miss it our skin is twisted as harvest & smells like summer all day I hungered outside for something that is not…
National Poetry Month Day 25: Randall Mann
Letters from Satilla Diann Blakely, 1957-2014 1. Have you read Andrew Hudgins’ After the Lost War or even Sidney Lanier’s “The Marshes of Glynn”?