Rumpus Originals
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Aldrin Badiola
in the bathroom with eight fingers. Another shirtless man, this time in tight pants, asks if you want a piercing.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bird Shoots Buck
As roommates, our cycles of sleep/wake/work were staggered, dictated by our graduate classes, or, during the summer, our crummy temp jobs. Chores lived on a whiteboard and were completed asynchronously. We figured the kid was, at a baseline, another responsibility…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Like Camels Raging
The job had a heroic narrative appeal. I could already hear myself sighing to my mother on the phone: the mouths I’d fed, backs I’d scrubbed. She’d ask what would happen if I caught it – if my lungs burst…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Katie Berta
I don’t mind imprecision anymore and even seek it. How else are you supposed to convince your students you love each and every one of them, instead of loving just a few and only liking the rest very very much?
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Jordan Hamel
The number one cause of memory loss is memory. Gave up lying to anyone who isn’t me. The secret is ignoring the camera & staring at your mirrored self, so everything
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Rumpus Original Fiction: One of the Good Ones
When I first met Matteo—that is, when we were both eight years old—I had the habit of falling madly in love with anyone who shared a desk with me. A boy would ask to borrow a sheet of notebook paper,…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rabbit & Ox
It was Keefe’s first run since the wildfires, a week after an orange glow of an apocalyptic sky had greeted them one morning. Day 182, though she had stopped marking the calendar in Sharpie at Day 122, too depressed to…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Varun U. Shetty
At the pet store, I look for a toy that doesn’t resemble an animal
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Rumpus Original Essay: Center of Gravity
I’ve always been good at picking Ethan out of a crowd. When you love someone, you know where they are. I can taste the roar and purr of the ice under his blades. I imagine his parents watching him as…
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The Femcel Catalog a.k.a. The Annals of Obsession
When you were younger, you learned how to hold your breath so you could crawl on the pool floor. Down there, the day sounded different, so you swam for as long as possible. The rising hum of water encircled you,…
