Leah Umansky: #NotTrump Series
This is my Mother
“I guess God is a Woman,” my mother texts me after the media mentioned a leaked Donald Trump video about his sexual harassment of women. “Things have a way of working out,” she said. My mother is newly obsessed with Twitter. She tweets to actors she doesn’t know, and newscasters she is a fan of. She should’ve been a politician, as she is one of the most opinionated people I know. During the 2nd Presidential Debate, she tweeted to Trump. I didn’t know. I didn’t see her tweets until the following week when she called me over to her to brag about Marc Cuban. “What about Marc Cuban,” I asked, “Oh god, you aren’t tweeting to him are you?” I asked. “Marc Cuban liked my tweet,” she replied. (He actually didn’t.) Then, I took her phone and looked at her Twitter feed. I broke down laughing. Her tweet said, “@realdonaldtrump, You’re fired.” I laughed, not at how original it was, not at the way she has stepped with certainty into the 21st century, but at the joy she gave me in that moment, my mother. This is my mother. She sat at the kitchen table, acting so cavalier, so lackadaisical. “Everyone’s saying that to him,” she said. “He’s going to put a hit out on you.” I said, sarcastically. “You think so?” she said frantically. “No, but he could,” I said.
Leah Umansky is the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), and the full length, Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX, 2012). She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches middle and high school English in New York City. Her new full-length manuscript, The Barbarous Century was shortlisted for The Sexton Prize. More atwww.LeahUmansky.com
