Leah Umansky

Doing

1/         
There is no word for the opposite of feminism I tell a student. It is not procedural or political, but societal. Patriarchal.  The student laughs and then acknowledges the absurdity in it all, in the past. 
 
2/
Toni Morrison said in an article on The Guardian, that as citizens, we are always told by the press, so and so tried and she notes that no one does anymore. 

I do. I don’t know where I’m headed, but I know how to yearn. This off-season needs to end.   I am not what is left over, I will never be. I am the dirty work, the hopeless grind and the sweet heaven. I will scrawl these whispers into walls. I will unlock myself. Speak to me. I am doing this.
 
3/
I am urging myself to express more frustration.

I felt that this was a strange stream spraying. I felt this was nothing to get hysterical over, but still, a situation that needed voice. We always need voice. Nothing is picture-perfect and if that means we bring the pace to a stop, so be it. I am urging myself to be less meticulous, less focused, to take what is given to me, and take what I need. Still, do men have such thoughts? No. Because there is no word for their struggles.   
 
4/        
I am a bringer. I bring to the table. I bring to my life and to yours. I beg and wonder if it is just a little stifled voice.  Let me put it another way. We all want to step out into a day and know we are good, and know we try our best at all times. 
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Leah Umansky is the author, most recently of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) and a full-length collection, Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX 2013). She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator of the COUPLET Reading Series in NYC, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Poetry, Magma (UK), Faerie Magazine, Boston Review and Posit. Her new full-length collection, The Barbarous Century is a 2016 finalist for the Sexton Prize.