parents
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Kill Shot
1964, a month prior to the anniversary of JFK’s assassination, a different home movie shot. Infant toss. Up-down. Plummeting. I’m ten months of age—picking up speed.
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Eating in Purgatory
I always say the last time was the last time, and I always mean it, but I’m scared I’ll relapse again.
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Who Will Claim Us?
I was thinking of my closet at home, guilt twisting my insides as I considered all the things I’d taken without knowing what it was I really wanted.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: A Brief History of a Bad Heart
She studies you, still panting with an energy that consumes the room, and whispers in a reedy voice: “They say you fucked up your heart.”
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jennifer Whitaker
Jennifer Whitaker discusses her new collection The Blue Hour, persona poems, the violence in fairy tales, and writing about sexual abuse.
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Difficult Decisions
She was fed exclusively through a gastrostomy tube. Although she couldn’t speak, she often smiled and made noises and expressed pleasure in the company of her siblings. Her parents — worried that their daughter’s continued growth would restrict her ability…
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Albums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree
I knew if I could make it out of town, make it to college, I would survive. But I wasn’t sure I would.
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Plankton (A Body of Stars)
Plankton either grows into something other than plankton—a strong swimming non-planktonic adult, like a crab or a fish, or it stays the same—forever drifting with the shifting tides.
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Mole Biopsies and Other Love Notes
If this were a comic book, Bad Mole would be skulking in a dark alley, wearing an ill-fitting trench coat.
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Collares
“You were promised to the religion,” Carlos Aldama says, his eyes watery and somber. “One of your parents said, ‘Mi hija lo paga.’” My daughter will pay.
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The Surgeon’s Stitches
“They were stupid questions because he already knew the answers to them,” Dad said. “He just hadn’t taken the time to think about them. And questions you haven’t thought out are stupid ones.”
