From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Em
For her twenty-first birthday, Kiều’s younger siblings set fire to her bed.
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Posts Tagged: family
The Night of Little Big Man
I was a watcher: Sometimes my father called me a hawk, taking in everything. Most especially him. I knew when he was angry by the clench of his fists and his jaw. When he relaxed at the piano, his shoulders rode lower on his body.
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From the Archives: Voices on Addiction: None of This Is Bullshit
I was fine. No one and nothing could hurt me.
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From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
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From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
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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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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Mr. Burley
My favorite was usually the smallest, the most alive.
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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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Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still.
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From the Archive: What Burns in the Pit
“Things can catch fire even when they let each other go. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop loving them.”
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Complete the Sentence
We baked a fresh bowl for dinner?, I wonder. Do you think the pen will sink or grow? Do you think a pen will sink or throw? Sure. This could be a very delightful exercise (for poets), I think to myself.
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From the Archive: The Dark All Around Us
There is still light in the dark. This is the paradox that Little Bear has to accept in order to fall asleep.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction—The Christmas Party
I laugh. My laugh, this thing that sounds better on somebody else.
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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: My Mother Fires Guns
You are never really at peace with what you haven’t gotten.
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Turning the Lights On
I feel guilt in the not good enough I carry alongside the not bad enough.
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Voices on Addiction: Vessel
We both can disappear in our own ways, can’t we?
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Smoke Signals to the Dead: A Conversation with Jenny Qi
Jenny Qi discusses her debut poetry collection, FOCAL POINT.
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Holding Together What’s Left: The Blues of Heaven by Barbara Ras
You want to, but do you? Do you dare hope?
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Searching for Sleeper Trains
There aren’t enough trains in Los Angeles. Not enough for me to sleep.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Christine No
“Balance is its own beautiful practice.”
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You Can’t Stop Rivers from Running: Talking with Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir discusses ANTIMAN and CUTLISH.
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Bringing to Light: A Gathering and Tethering of Memory in Darla Himeles’s Cleave
Poems echo, rebound, and speak to one another.
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Voices on Addiction: Keep It Simple, Sweetheart
Finding joy in the now, even as death and difficulty mark the days, is possible, a choice, and a practice.
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Wow, Mom!: Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker
The best books I have read about motherhood have not reassured me that these feelings will resolve.
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Tongue Stuck
It was a kind of madness to speak a language to my son that I hadn’t used in almost a decade.
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Creating a Fractured Whole: Megan Culhane Galbraith’s The Guild of the Infant Saviour
To have lost, found, and then lost again seems especially wrenching, a kind of unmothering.
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