From the Archive: Unbound
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
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Posts Tagged: emergency room
When the Healing Place Exploded
Clothes, plants, and broken aluminum doors on balconies—all was inside out.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #214: Sarah Kersey
“A poem cannot exist without form or structure, just like the human body can’t operate without a skeleton.”
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Voices on Addiction: They Call It Spirits
Why was he so broken? And why did his broken make me feel broken, too?
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I Will Not Die for You
Each bug in the water is one less bug on my fruit, I tell myself, ignoring the truth: under the soil, another is born.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Barbecue
Up close, the beach was disgusting and tragic. A million tiny pieces of plastic were heaped on the shore like confetti from a hundred parades, or like the real sand on the beach threw up.
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The Middle Season
My doctor told me to begin with adding five minutes to my morning walk. During those five minutes, I recalled the life I’d once had—that intense life that ambition gave me—and the man I’d once been.
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Meditation
We looked up as we moved. A handful of stars watched us behind a ripped black canvas of clouds. It started to rain as we all got to our cars. The skies poured down globs of heavy rain that burst out like tiny bombs around us.
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The Mortgage Arrangement
It’s true that real estate can’t save a marriage. But it might be equally true that it can save a relationship.
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Albums of Our Lives: My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade
The summer before my final year at college, my fear started to manifest as an anxiety disorder specializing in sickness and disease.
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My Life with Annie Lennox: A Christmas Cornucopia
Perhaps part of what prompted me to get clean and sober was the fact I kept making myself uncomfortable.
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Past the Break
Past the break lies motherhood as I understand it: the rawest life that lifts and falls and crashes against beauty, and the eternal potential for heartbreak.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Infarct, I Did
This essay is not about love. Love doesn’t enter into it. We are talking mechanics. Four chambers, ventricles and atria. The mammalian heart, and thus, the bat heart, and thus, the human heart.
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Ursa Major
Last month a bear ripped into my tent, clenched his teeth onto my upper left arm, just below my shoulder, and would not let go.
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