And Then You Dump It

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 two full length collections, The Barbarous Century, and Domestic Uncertainties 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 Thrush Poetry Journal, Glass Poetry Journal, The New York Times, POETRY, Guernica, The Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Rhino, and Pleiades. She is resisting the tyrant with her every move. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.