From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Forty-Six
Waiting to turn forty-six is like standing in the unrelenting sunshine.
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Posts Tagged: guns
From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: I Left My Heart in Taos
You might gasp. You might gasp and your heart slips out. You whisper and let red willows drift toward the river.
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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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Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Gustavo Alvarez
Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez talks with Cullen Thomas about PRISON RAMEN, and more.
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The Blacker the Berry, the Quicker They Shoot
Fear is real. Pain is real. Loss is real. Suffering is real.
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Too Close to Home
I can’t relax. Bullets are on my mind.
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Within the Scope
While my friends write their truths in nearby cabins, I wear my silence like a bulletproof vest.
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Between Sex and Death: Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets
Survival, for Landau, is both instinctual and ultimately pointless.
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Lady Justice
I imagine Lady Justice’s fingers tipping the scales: Rose to leave, and me to sleep.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Shelter in Place
I tell Kurinda I’d lie flat on the floor under a pile of jackets.
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Split Chins, Open Coats
My whistle was useless. Using it felt like an insult.
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SquareRoot of Love: Broken Heart
We must find a way to keep the roots of love and justice strong.
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A Friend in the Dark
The process of guiding people to speak their truths was isolating.
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The Constituent Parts
I was seven the first time I fired a gun.
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Two Extraordinary Books: Bullets into Bells and Inquisition
The obscenities and tragedies of American life pile up with speed, and in quantities, that are appalling.
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A Real Good Guy
Doesn’t murder exclude a person from being described as “a good guy”?
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This Future Is Here: Talking with Tom McAllister
Tom McAllister discusses his new novel, How to Be Safe, workshops, Twitter, dystopia, and narrative voice.
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Moving Targets
Love twists itself into fear, into statistics, into things people can live with.
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Strong Island’s Horizon
Whose lives are visible? Whose pain is just? Whose grief is vocal? Such inquiry is not rhetorical.
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Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
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Guns or No Guns: Mental Health Crisis in Schools
I do the best I can to reach out to those I see isolated or disturbed, but I have to also be careful I don’t make myself a target.
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What to Do with My Body in the Event I Die in a Mass Shooting
Don’t join them in their prayers (the god they pray to doesn’t exist).
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sarah Blake
Sarah Blake discusses her new collection, Let’s Not Live on Earth, questions in poems, monsters, and the challenge of writing a dystopia.
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An Arduous Reality: Testify by Simone John
Simone John’s first full-length collection of poems, Testify, is a remarkable exercise in documentary poetics.
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Finding Freedom
We never want something more than when it has been taken away from us. The opposite of freedom is confinement.
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Cowboy or Terrorist? Harney County and the Trump Presidency
One person’s freedom to do anything they want can mean the absolute negation of another’s freedom.
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A Deeply Human Act: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
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Dispatches from the Swamp: The Absolute Necessity of Softball
And then one guy on his team yells, “You have to touch the bases, buddy! This is still America!” That is all it takes. For one guy on the other side to put country over party.
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