This Could Be Love
She drags me to each room, to each shadow: the witch, the devil, her own figure at the space where a closet meets the wall.
Papa's Tallit
It was also a good thing I had no idea what Papa was saying because every morning he thanked God he was not born a woman.
Ghost Feathers
The cold in the laundromat is specific. It is a broken-radiator cold, Buffalo, New York cold, the rotten-side-of-the-holidays cold, the cold you feel when a spirit is close.
For the Good of Those Who Love Him
Saul’s father sits down next to him, lights Saul’s candle and pats his leg. He’s always more affectionate in church, like he’s forgotten his normal behaviors. Distracted by the possibility of God, he remembers Saul.
All This Time Her Bones
Have you come to the part of your life in which you contemplate your mother’s bones?
In Ourselves, In Our Writing
When we write about people of our own creation, when we write fiction, there’s different work to do. We aren’t just noticing and deciding how to tell what we’ve noticed or experienced...We’re painting in those faint images and sensations ourselves, layering them onto more concrete descriptions of place and reality.
Spoiled
As the sun soars, heat blots out birdsong, the scratchy call of insects, and soon there’s nothing but the tramp of our boots across the parched earth.
Boredom Interrupted
The flies struggle, but I persevere, and after what seems like forever, wings held tight against their bodies, the flies are sliding down the glass on streams of the liquid, like a fatal carnival ride.
If Party Wolf Jumps
All of which is to say when you remember Baker now it’s best to remember him with the wolf mask on, and if you remember the weeks you spent dating his older sister, remember only the good parts and the parts that make you look good.
Wait for Me
I might spend five minutes yelling into the phone, "It's me, Mamina! Your Granddaughter!" And I will hear, "Who? Who?" And I'll try and try again to no avail and think she can't hear me anymore, she can't see me anymore.
And From His Grave a Rose
We drank hot black Turkish coffee, quashing our grimaces, pretending our tastes had changed.
for the love of lowly things (for Mary)
In December, it is the season of Advent in the church calendar, and in the sanctuary, large-scale artwork of a pregnant belly adorns the stage. I wonder at the quiet fury and joy of Mary, her declaration in the Magnificat that God has “filled the hungry and sent the rich away empty.”
2020 Broadside Poetry Prize Winner
Ruminate Magazine is thrilled to share with you the winners of the 2020 Broadside Poetry Prize!
Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy
Baking is precise and often pretty; cooking, more improvisational; I like them both and lose myself that way, which is a life skill and I recommend it.
Origin Story
I understand the urge to do it up, up up and away, until you get so far gone and high the only place to come back down is on some open stretch of highway.
Issue 57: Mend Readers' Notes
We are thrilled to share some hand-picked readers' notes featured in Issue 57: Mend. Be sure to check out our winter 2020 issue.
My Condolences
The girl, whose name I never learned, didn’t die before the song was over, and we never saw her again.
Sister Synergy + Pregnancy from Contemplating My Internal Organs + Digestive Issues
Pinky Bass's visual art appears in Issue 57: Mend.
The Ducks in Winter
I even envy my old life now, my own youth, so I start rearranging the furniture to make the past come back, or some of it.
Not Always the Hero
It is difficult to realize that someone you respect and care for understands you and people that look like you as self-centered and reactionary because you demand inalienable rights.
For the Millions
Oh Best Beloved, a poem can’t pull / anyone back from death / into life, but it can pull the dead / into a poem.
Waiting
I think about my mother in the garden hilling green beans, and I asked her if I could go on birth control, and she didn’t say anything, which meant “yes,” which meant “no,” which meant, “I’m hilling beans right now.
Beneath a Vacant Sky
Marla is convinced that if the moon hadn’t exploded, Austin would’ve kissed her.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and visual-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.
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