All in by Leah Umansky

Ars Poetica: Contact Beauty

SWWIM Every Day
by Leah Umansky

by Leah Umansky


‍ ‍After Maria Popova and for Josh Sapan and The Riverhouse‍ ‍


We name what we see and there are ways to see everything.

This morning, after the river cleaned and cleared itself,

The thick, jagged sheets of ice now gone, the phantom river

Once pushing through the then solid coverlet of snow, now gone,

Gone, and streaming down as one river now to the Delaware Water Gap,

We see two ducks diving for fish at the riverbank, their bodies

Curving into a lowercase ‘c,’ or a partnered dance of sharps and flats

On the bars of the river’s length. We reach for The Sibley Guide to Birds

To learn their names: Red-Breasted Merganser and Hooded Merganser.

We watch these beauties now, unfettered, with their hooded tuft of hair,

And their black and white mask, here, at the break of winter when the sun

Has melted everything in sight. Even the December air is not what it was.

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Leah Umansky’s newest collection, OF TYRANT, is out now with The Word Works. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her work can be found on PBS, The Slowdown, and such places as the New York Times, RHINO, and Poetry. See leahumansky.com.

And Then You Dump It

SWWIM Every Day
by Leah Umansky

by Leah Umansky


Once you hear it all, once you dream past or burn through

the techniques, the torture, those emotional blizzards

of heartbreak, the great guided guttural pain and

their responses, they are merely barren, simply vacant. Simply put: a desert

of want. And the response is to always have a spare, or a back-up, and to bear any heat

as to keep it running over, running under, and running across

the page, and the mind. Who’s to say at least you and got yours? Please. All torrents

would tell you otherwise. A flood is more than a flood; it is a pouring through,

past what is natural, past baselines, fallacies and logic. It is a narrow

belief of boundaries and delicacies. These imaginary lines you draw get you started;
everything else just passes.


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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 is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Thrush Poetry Journal, Glass Poetry Journal, The New York Times, POETRY, Guernica, The Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Rhino, and Pleiades. She is resisting the tyrant with her every move. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.