Voices on Addiction: Washed Clean
That’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river.
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Posts Tagged: Rumpus essays
The Muralist
The thing about living with my ex’s mural of his own ex about two hundred feet from my apartment was that I loved it.
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The Most-Read Essays of 2022
Essays are all about reflection, and we thought we’d kick off 2023 with a look at the most-read pieces of last year. It can sometimes feel like hours (years) of hard work disappear into the maw of our short attention spans, and these lists serve as important reminders of the work. — The Eds. *** #1 […]
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Anecdotal and Harsh
The thing about trauma is that it can split a person right down the middle. And J. was, indeed, bifurcated in this way. That is, she occupied multiple timelines simultaneously.
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Space to Breathe
We inhale when we’re born, then breathe and breathe and breathe until one day we exhale our final breath.
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The Last Book
The poet goes to the supermarket for peanut butter. The poet cleans the toilet. The poet responds to emails.
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Constraints: A Hometown Ode
. . . the sheets hold a diagonal crease: the memory of the line, an imprint as obvious and useless as the adult our childhood selves once planned to be.
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SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW: A Search for Transcendence & Annihilation in New Zealand’s Hippie Paradise
“I once ate a mushroom in New Zealand,” I tell people, “though I had no idea if it was edible.”
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Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
In 2022, I attended the 106th running of the Indianapolis 500, and watched cars hurtle past at 220 mph—fast enough to cover a football field in nine tenths of a second. Over 325,000 fans cheered louder than the engines themselves.
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The Lucky Ones
I live my life through the twin tenets of curiosity and close observation. I believe imagination and storytelling are central to our survival as a species—and yet, it’s my imagination that makes me jumpy.
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Voice On Addiction: Another Thing to Chase
She’s still somehow always thirsty . . . At least none of these drinks will kill her, even if the hunt for mood and mind-altering, for distraction, for something out there to help, may follow her to the grave.
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The Dark Mothers’ Club
I know all the hours intimately as any lover, the lucid high of four a.m. as familiar as the adrenaline drunk of noon.
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Call for Submissions: September ’22 Themed Month
Education is perhaps the most vulnerable and intimate experience people can have with each other that is not familial or romantic. It’s so easy for the classroom to be either harmful—consider the destruction of a person’s curiosity and confidence in learning is muddled by shame or helplessness— or transformative when done well—empowering a student to […]
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Honey
That cafe smelled like fresh-baked bread and cookies, and the baristas were all women with warm, soft hands who called everyone — the Senator, the mothers, the babies, the businessmen — Honey. So many baristas would have called you Honey, David. And swayed along with you when they played Perfume Genius during the slow hours. The day after someone […]
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From the Archive: Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair
No word is wasted. No story is told in vain.
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Sons and Daughters
Boys were boys and girls were girls and gender norms were there for a reason. We didn’t realize the reason was to keep women down. Maybe we just didn’t care.
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