Essays Archives - The Rumpus

Cover of Metric album Grow Up and Blow Away

Sugar Factory

Though I can’t prove Haines wrote “On the Sly” about or even in Toronto—though the timing seems to line up with her and Shaw meeting here in the late 90s—somehow everything about this city seems packed into that line about the sugar factory.

To My First Mother

It would be nice to look in the mirror and see you.

Letter to My Dad

I wonder if the adoption agency thought they were clever, or if they thought both adoptive parents and adoptee having brown hair was enough to signal we belonged to each other.

Essays

Empty Houses Ring

emerging into one junk-filled yard where every space is laden with boards and tires and tubes and appliances and a van undriveable loaded like a mind in tatters . . .

To My Third Father

I didn’t understand consent, the formal severance of me and my biological father. Like magic, my past dissipated.

Mayonnaise

I don’t know which herbs, spices, or ice cream flavors you like because 23&Me won’t tell me, and neither will you.

Essays

Three Flash Essays by Lane Michael Stanley

Teeth line the leaves of the agave, protecting fleshy, leathery spined crescents that open like a bowl to the sky. Perhaps I would have a higher tolerance for flowers as vaginal metaphors if their petals had teeth.

Reaching

Last summer, I tied my hair into braids and glued a mustache to my upper lip, and I wondered if you might recognize your own youth.

Selkies

Songs of the sea, of the forecastle where the sailors slept at night: Home, Dearie, Home.

Essays

All in Good Taste

Vickie Lynn became a stripper by chance.

Immigrant Experience as an Oedipal War of Words in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects

Words that do not match their peers or adhere to linguistic rules and expectations are the driving trope for the discordance of the immigrant experience in this novel.

Essays

A Lot of Other Women

One night, lazing on her grownup bed, Miri laughs about a girl in the year above.

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