Dolores 1

 
 
 
               after Westworld

 

At night, you forget everything:

this century

the cold

the searing of hand and wrist.

 

At the back, the capturing goes further

               into reason and rationale.

 

He is not open to your plenty, your footfalls and despairs.

 

His mistake of what is infinite is a means to an end;

a grave display of loss.

 

Call it: a skewering of a winged contempt.

 

Dolores, what is taking flight here?

 

Both of our worlds are a vivid falling.

 

               You, Dolores, who are so painfully aware,

               are but a flaw.

               (but who wants to be flawless?)

 

Your knowing tethers your world to ours.

That grave risk is a secret pride.

It suggests you are extraordinary.

 

He turns you on and off and on. He tells you, you are not so,

but you are; you are; you know you are.

 

Your knowing is but a fragment of truth.
 
 
 

[Photo credit: Jen Fitzgerald]

Leah Umansky is the author, most recently, of The Barbarous Century, out with London's Eyewear Publishing in March 2018. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the host and curator of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Guernica, The White Review, Barrow Street, Plume and The Golden Shovel Anthology. Some of her Game of Thrones related poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali. She is #teamkhaleesi & #teammaeve