Rumpus Poetry Archives

Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Fady Joudah

The bees would not miss us if the entire neighborhood went missing. / The reverse isn’t true. The mind goes to self // as the self comes to mind. / The mind tells the self, I made you, / and the self asks, who gave you that idea?

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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by J Brooke

I drew a house / I drew a house with a tire swing / I drew a house with a tire swing and deep green grass / I drew a house with a tire swing and deep green grass and a little pond

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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by E. Hughes

I want to fashion my black mouth to speak this / journey of our bodies into utterance: What / does one call this road between us?

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National Poetry Month Day 11: Denice Frohman

Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.

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National Poetry Month Day 6: Ally Ang

Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.

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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Todd McKinney

Of course, it’d be wonderful to have / the Southern Hemisphere back.

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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves

Balladeer Quatrains This slant-ass love song is for six storeys of cement and light and how it held every portable us blanket-swaddled against scattering. This is for…

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ENOUGH: Power Dome

Women just need to live / inside a geodesic dome / powered by male rage; / the angrier they get / the safer we’ll be

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Clearing the Bar with Care and Complexity: Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind

The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik [implores] us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.

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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Janan Alexandra

2. In literary Arabic, kaph is used as a prefix to mean like or as or as though / 3. If kaph is a hand that means like or as or as though, then kaph is a simile / 4. Simile is a hand touching two places at once, a hand bringing together / two far away things, making a transfer (metaphor)

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Another Oracle: Lynn Xu’s Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Light

Almost ten years have passed since Lynn Xu’s debut, the luminous Debts & Lessons, introduced us to her oracle. “Let it not be for what you write, the world /…

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The Sense of Words: Reverse Engineer by Kate Colby

. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.

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