All the Forgetting
so many ends before the end.
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Posts Tagged: death
From the Archive: The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation
I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope.
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The Last Book
The poet goes to the supermarket for peanut butter. The poet cleans the toilet. The poet responds to emails.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: White Ash
My wife, Ritu, a receptionist at a motel, works four nights a week. In the morning, I pick her up in our used Honda and drive her home. After she showers, I bring her a cup of fresh ginger and cardamom tea. She smells of lavender, her hair glowing with water beads, her eyelashes stuck […]
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Forty-Six
Waiting to turn forty-six is like standing in the unrelenting sunshine.
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From the Archive: What It Is to Be Human: Talking with Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her new novel, MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION.
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Voices on Addiction: Motherless in Albertsons
I am sick with grief, triggered by my mother’s death, in turn triggered by Chardonnay.
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Joe at the Aquarium
I pushed him so he glided through the fish, the eels, the boxed-in worlds of blues.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: What Wasn’t
She gave him a small, relieved laugh. In another world, she replied.
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What Russian Grammar Taught Me about Death
I wanted to feel in control of something, but I didn’t know how to say that.
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Laughing Through It: Emily Austin’s Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
Morbid humor exists for a reason: to poke fun at our inevitable ends and lighten its emotional load.
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Reclaiming the Roots of Self-Care: A Conversation with Nneka M. Okona
Nneka M. Okona discusses her new book, SELF-CARE FOR GRIEF.
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Best Friends
“Speaking English so well” seemed to be the key to open many doors.
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Lamentation for Songbirds
If the birds were first, other small things would surely follow, and we are the caretakers of small things.
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The Art of Bearing Witness: Sanctuary by Emily Rapp Black
As the title suggests, Sanctuary creates a safe space for grief in all its forms.
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Bones of Buried Kings
What makes a body violable? This jaw, a piece of evidence. This body, the remains of a life.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Tick Tock Write”
“Tick tock tick tock,” Raven says. “It’s my departure or yours.”
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There Are No Cheap Seats in Lauren Shapiro’s Arena
Resonance is a given. You can’t help but hear. In Lauren Shapiro’s Arena, every seat is the best seat in the house.
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Acts of Love: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Zauner’s memoir is not a performance, but an act of love, including all the dirty little bits that come with it.
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Inner Conversations Projected on a Surface: Bruno K. Öijer’s The Trilogy
A family’s grief traps generations in a search for insight.
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Voices on Addiction: System Failure
“Was it vodka?” Mama said. Her voice had cracks in it. Why ask? She knew.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Human”
Man was living on the moon but Medicare was still a disaster.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Barong
Appearance aside, my boss took his work seriously.
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Discovering the Thought: A Conversation with Andrés Cerpa
Andrés Cerpa discusses his new poetry collection, THE VAULT.
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We Are Not Gods: Talking with Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen discusses her new story collection, HER LESSER WORK.
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Poetry as Incantation: Talking with Andrea Actis
Andrea Actis discusses her debut book, GREY ALL OVER.
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Accidental Altars
Choose, the specter points in opposite directions.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Daddies and Sons
When Jeb was old enough to have a family of his own, he hardly ever laid hands on his boys.
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Omayra (In Other Words)
I wonder, then, what it is to die. Perhaps to die is a matter of location.
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A Girl-Body Filled with Animals
There was nothing in the world I had ever needed to do quite like dance.
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