Leah Umansky: August 2016 Poet of the Month
What Will I Do With All These Wolves?
I am wonder-led by wolves.
This night-world is our lyric, our pack-song.
We comb these paths for beauty, but I cannot chart the countless devouring of tooth and nail
My wolves are wanderers. I, their huntress.
one stores costumes
one thinks he predominates
one lives a life of wind and waves
one thinks darkness is key
one thinks all is retro
one never leaves me
one tangles light and shadow
one folds fable into dreams
one bites anything that moves
one bites anything indulgent
one suggests ferociousness
one imagines dreaming
one absorbs the hurt of the past
one stories for me
one is mine (all mine)
one thinks he knows a way to better days
one keeps remnants in a hole in a cave
together, we rise our way through darkened rambles and haunted freeze-frames
together, we torch what nips at our ankles, and pulls at our hair
together, we anchor each day into a new day, a new existence, a new tomorrow
The Decline
I’m still here. I only lost
this bland attraction for this horizon.
I felt this movement, then this spur.
Each thing is earning its loss.
This life impresses and suppresses; it feels forwardly,
unloading onto some kind of night.
So, I undress, a calm dance in a moment of dark,
for dawn is the beginning of new deaths.
The world has lived long. This world has lived long enough
to accept what frontiers hold still…
The world is always ending
It is a dewy process because of the vision.
Because of the vision, even when there’s so much
that is wide-eyed and gobsmacked, I feel each daily-collapse.
I wanted the closing eye of the vision turned inside itself,
combusting into sparks and the disillusionment of many minds.
Could we story its love; create its faith;
compress its past; appropriate its sense of man?
I don’t know.
[What if this is all just a backdrop?]
Would the birds return to their branch-callings?
Look. Do you see my wolf perk up his ears?
Rebecca Melnyk
Leah Umansky is the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World, out by Kattywompus Press in 2016, the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream, voted one of The Top 10 Chapbooks To Read Now in 2014 by Time Out New York. (Kattywompus Press, 2014) and the full length collection, Domestic Uncertainties, (BlazeVOX, 2013).
