"Call and Response: An Anchoring" by Leah Umansky
This is a selection from our Spring/Summer 2021 "The Empire Issue". Please click here to purchase a print or digital version of the full issue featuring prose, poetry, and art.
I tell a friend there is so much to feel
guilty about
then I think about how this is a woman’s thought a woman’s problem
the way we anchor ourselves to annihilation
the way we anchor
ourselves to the mast ready to go
down
*
I tell the nurse at pre-surgical that this was my choice: I’m 41, I say. This is what I want. No guilt, no regrets and she says that is beautiful. And I know it is. This hope. This plan. This wind thrusting my sail forward. I am the anchoring. The anchor.
*
I exist and I exist for my self. I exist for others but those in my fold, in my choosing. The semantics of my leap, or my stacking, my moving metaphor, my rowing full speed ahead is mine and mine alone.
I can’t pretend otherwise.
*
Fran Lebowitz pleas “pretend it’s a city,” and I already am. The city is my version of the city, my own hovering scent above the street musk, my own vividness, portraiting the ruins and treasures at every term. Of course, this is a leap. The city is also an ugly vein bursting. Of course, this is just semantics. [Po-tay-to/po-tah-toe]. Of course, there is much the guilt of all the not-doing, all the not-doing-enough; all the nots knot me up inside, but then I think of the snow this week and I am in that sharp crush of brilliance and gleam.
*
In the brilliance and gleam, I am not a city of one, but a city of plenty. I am alert and pressing. I am a mind spread out, a smooth meandering of thought, a day of ever, everlasting in my own sprout of a city. My own block of myth and resilience and the long-line of hope.
I think back to the want. To the decision. The mark was already laid upon me, wasn’t it? My practicing of love, all my self-proclaimed antidotes, already setting the stage. This little place of my heart; the rock of my dry run, all the turns I’ve taken, just a cling for the dream to hold.
My horoscope says to appreciate the same treasures and patiently gather them in.
I am well versed
in gathering.
I am gathering the love now.
there is no chance to do anything over again
Who is ever ready?
Who is ever-ready?
The definition of responsible is being able to respond.
Leah Umansky is the author of two full-length collections, The Barbarous Century, and Domestic Uncertainties. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Bennington Review, American Poetry Review, Rhino, and Pleiades. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.
