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We’re accepting essays (750-4,000 words) by adoptees from 11/1 through 12/31 via Submittable. Publication will be in November 2023. Rumpus Essays Editor (and Book Club coordinator extraordinaire) Lauren J. Sharkey will be curating this series, and she’s elaborated on the types of stories (and whom) she is hoping to feature below. — Eds. *** When I was three-months-old, […]
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I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly, but I did feel a twang of remorse as we left her by herself.
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These days, I walk down to the river running through the town I’ve made mine. The water’s on the rise.
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“This is solid, mostly titanium,” the surgeon says while I’m still groggy in recovery. “You can’t pull it apart if you tried.,” and, almost as an afterthought, “Don’t try.”
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I always received glowing remarks on my alliteration or understanding of poetic devices, but they were hidden beneath what felt like hundreds of tiny red strikes across misspellings—although my phonetic versions of the words were sometimes genius, and always understandable.
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I haven’t slept in years, but I still can’t seem to wake up.
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The ableism of schools as workplaces means that all teachers are assumed to be able-bodied until a disabled teacher identifies their need for accommodations. Schools respond; they do not, to my knowledge, anticipate disabled teachers.
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I’d never thought of myself as separate from the world I lived in; the Outside I came from was sensory-rich and immersive, there my interactions unfolded organically and overlapped, building intuitively like the scales on a pinecone, rewarding curiosity with wonder.
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The term “invisible disability” is commonly used to describe disabilities that are not readily apparent to the eye, but I want to push back on this term. When you pay close attention, most disabilities become visible. Poems are not encoded messages that we’re meant to decipher, I frequently remind my students, they are language organized in ways that demand a different kind of attention. And so it is with invisible disabilities . . .
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Welcome to our themed “issue” on Disability in Education.
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It certainly wasn’t part of my grand plan to keep an ashtray full of cigarette butts for eternity.
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The editors put together a list of books for Mental Health Awareness Month.
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Not all of us are going to heal well.
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I know all the hours intimately as any lover, the lucid high of four a.m. as familiar as the adrenaline drunk of noon.
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. . . we wake up in human bodies every day and move forward with our lives, but every second of the day we’re thinking ahead, we’re thinking backward. Unfortunately, we’re rarely in the present time.
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The pain is the point.
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I am transfixed with the probability of earthquakes.
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Welcome to our themed “issue” for Mental Health Awareness Month.
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