And Then You Dump It by Leah Umansky

Once you hear it all, once you dream past or burn through

 

the techniques, the torture, those emotional blizzards

 

of heartbreak, the great guided guttural pain and

 

their responses, they are merely barren, simply vacant. Simply put: a desert

 

of want. And the response is to always have a spare, or a back-up, and to bear any heat

 

as to keep it running over, running under, and running across

 

the page, and the mind. Who’s to say at least you and got yours? Please. All torrents

 

would tell you otherwise. A flood is more than a flood; it is a pouring through,

 

past what is natural, past baselines, fallacies and logic. It is a narrow

 

belief of boundaries and delicacies. These imaginary lines you draw get you started;

 

                                                                                                             everything else just passes.

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Leah Umansky is the author of The Barbarous Century (Eyewear 2018), among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Guernica, The White Review, Barrow Street, Pleiades, Salamander, and the anthologies, The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books) and Misrepresented Peoples (NYQ Books). She is #teamkhaleesi & #teammaeve.