Rumpus Originals
-
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…
-
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…
-
![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…
-
Notes from the Playground
I am four years old, standing on the playground of the Jewish Community Center where I go to nursery school. My best friend Alice is not here today. Alice is my only friend. She lives in a bigger house than…
-
Born on a Dying Planet
The glittering sphere lives in the top drawer of Lela’s dresser. Sometimes she takes the ball and rolls it between her palms, and when she does her parents’ voices float forth. She rations these messages carefully, knowing there will never…
-
Pita
“When I visit my home, which is not very often, the local billboards I will pass are either for online sports gambling, car accident litigation, or mile counters to the nearest funeral home (which way, South Jersey man?). The current…
-
National Poetry Month: “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma”
A body can waste away quietly, carrying an enemy in its blood. It doesn’t want to fight; it wants to toil skin-deep in the blood.
-
Hell Is the Absence of God’s Love
We watch the neighbors and the high schoolers as we sip cold gin at the window. There’s the widow from the other side of the loop who chuckles while she takes an old Playgirl calendar and a paperback of Vixens…
-
National Poetry Month: “SUPER BOWL LX: BENITO”
Meaning the Boricua, not the brutish brain that argued Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State; meaning the man of the island outside US borders but not outside US possession, the descendant of sugarcane and…
-
National Poetry Month: “The Longshot”
The first woman ever made, walked into the hippodrome, counterclockwise, her jet arms paying homage to the great sunflower field of mothers she had left behind, scenic hips reminiscent of old bougainvillea
-
The One Who Pierces Snow
It was a game some of us played during recess, hidden behind a corner from the supervision of a teacher. We took turns. The person to depart would take in a deep breath and hold it, standing against a wall…
-
Three Poems
Lately, I’ve been angry with the world— it’s my new coping mechanism. Somewhere in my country, an oversized penis is being chiseled into the vagina of a six-year-old. I want it to break