Wanted/Needed/Loved #8: Torres’s Family Portrait
My given name is Mackenzie Scott. Scott is my father’s name, so I’ll always carry that legacy with me. My decision to call myself Torres was about wanting to honor the maternal side, as that’s my...
View ArticleThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Kill Shot
Air Force One landed at Love Field on what began as a gray and cold November day. By mid-morning it was springlike, skies shining bright and blue. The presidential limousine’s Plexiglas bubble-top had...
View ArticleWoman of the Earth
I try to find my balance as I kneel in the ocean. The sand beneath the water is warm, but the chilled wind runs over me. My hair covers my eyes and gets in my mouth.“Be free,” says Kevin, the...
View ArticleColorama
My mother pulls the baby blue Toyota Corolla into my grandparents’ driveway. I have been sitting in the back seat, my sister Lily in the front, and we’ve been fighting about it for the fifteen-minute...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman
I have boxes I haven’t opened in years, and they’re starting to feel like Pandora’s. On a dating website, one of the questions I was asked and chose to answer was, “would someone going through your...
View ArticleWanted/Needed/Loved: John Linnell’s Sentimental Nimslo
After having transitioned like everyone else to digital photography, I started to feel nostalgic for this period when everyone learned photography by taking film photos and then going into a darkroom...
View ArticleInhabitation and Invocation: Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex
Early in Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, April 2020), Candice Wuehle writes, “i’m going to speak slowly / in the language of the mise en abyme, of Spiralism.” This collection is a testimony to...
View ArticleA Photographer’s Wife
Pre-pandemic, my husband was always meeting new women. These women worked as food and prop stylists and assistants to food and prop stylists on the sets where my husband was the photographer. The women...
View ArticleOmayra (In Other Words)
At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow this? – Ilya Kaminsky No one had heard of the town until it was gone. Then, gone, everyone...
View ArticlePicasso Shares His Screen
Even though Picasso knew that millions of people would likely see Guernica at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, he probably could not have imagined that eighty years later we’d look at his painting, a...
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