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Poetry

“Orbit,” “Becoming Unbecoming”

 

Orbit

 

For me, it’s an appreciation of my will and my willingness to release: mutual forces yet mutually exclusive.  

If you feel something getting tight, start over. 

*

Storms on Saturn can create diamonds, uncut, but full of sheen and star. Eventually, they are forced to dissolve into a liquid, but at one time they are wholly spark and heft. [THINK: gemstones falling in space.] It’s the pressure that acts. I don’t want pressure to act, just to get me in motion, and I am already in flight.

 

Becoming Unbecoming

 

We lean towards our habit, our inventiveness. We feel what we see. We shift. We pattern. We turn. It is a revelation: the reveling, the revealing, the unveiling, the lifting off of the inner-revolutions is a revelation in itself. I walk through the room, seeing where to step, noticing where to turn, but still, I bump. Still, I bang. Still, we are unbecoming and becoming and unbecoming…

 

/

 

I am unbecoming. The paths are endless now, waiting. I am rendering the rigor, the fieldwork, quartering my truths; I am beginning the story over.

 

I am beginning the story over. What is coming, once frozen, soon will be parched and open-mouthed, soon will be relieved and mystical and striving for a voice, a laugh, a face from within. I can smile now, knowing I took the chance, knowing I didn’t race away from the fear, the ragged, the silent flight of loneliness, knowing I went towards the glimmer, its stalk, its humbling of the self; now, I will pattern anew. The I, once heroic, will bird itself into glee, a testament to seeing, a light in the room once dark. No wait-starts, no empties of meaning, the upended now neutral. The unbecoming will become again, a story, a jumble of soft and will sharp into a shape, already familiar.

 

//

 

Getting here, to this point, to the middle of this line, is a becoming, is a stare with the eye, an inherent worth, a stare in the face of the world, a wave of both truth and toxin, a whale of a run towards the light of any eye, any heart,

my heart.

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 has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, The Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Rhino, Guesthouse, and Pleiades. Leah can be found online at leahumansky.com.

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