mourning
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The Depths We Don’t Have Words For: Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s Echolocation
[R]eading these poems feels like looking down into deep water, being able to see only so far and no farther.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Day of the Dead
Octavio is tired, tired of trying to separate what he remembers so vividly from the memories he can barely make out in the fog.
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Elegy with Records on the Doorstep
The old music still filled pits in him like sawdust and wood glue do a nail hole. The songs didn’t say anything new over the years, but they provided home when he missed it.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, shaky cultural bridges are strengthened through mourning in Lito Velázquez’s Saturday Essay, “A Taste of Something, Slowly Over Time.” Then, Brandon Hicks offers an illustrated early Valentine’s Day treat: true love and eternal happiness is churned out in the automated romantic…
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R.I.P.: Inauguration Day
Instead of mourning in solitude, let us sob together. Let us soak communally in our fear. Let us hyperventilate, our breasts heaving in unison.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Red Whole
I’ve become an abridged version of myself—made half-done and meager. Made hungry for answers.
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The Life Jacket
How later you learned grief and love are partners too. How love held you through grief’s fire.
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Missing
I long to learn from my darkest teachers, feel the stab of their spectacular rejection. Perhaps I feel most alive when I’m hurting.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Through the Vitrine
It has been fifteen years, but I can still remember every moment of that year. It is cased in a vitrine, and the things I see through the wavy plexiglass are indistinct and as odd as that car going the…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of the grief story, and you get a subject that can…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: On Theft
Maybe this is what compelled Stella to plunder goods without paying. Her mother had been taken, her heart song snatched away. The stealing became her mourning.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Widow
If he had died in the Civil War, the extent of my mourning would have been a scandal. He was not my husband, my fiancé, my father, or my brother.