maybe near Coldwater or Jackson or Cass River—a Shell station off I-69 N, it was where I extracted it, the ring from my left pointer finger when hand-washing in the restroom because it would keep damp, make discomfort, discomfit me—the chalcedony in a silver bezel. did not feel its lack, misplaced placement, not for another two hours. it was some ways south, mileages away, unknown. distraught, I was: agitated as from emotional conflict, as made asunder, to stretch, taut. I called myself distraught and an idiot. there was no time for compassion. I lack patience as well as jewelry. I had lasted 355 miles of unlit Midwest hotcake flat—made so by a glacier, the Laurentide ice sheet in the Quartenary period 2.6 million years from me weepily driving with dark nothings in the rear-view. I had lasted half a year of twisted foot and crutch, of cruel email, of puke, of identity crisis, now of lost ring. no thing seems declarative to me in winters, not arresting, no thing to impress upon the eye—I scour the vanishing point ahead, sour with a certain luster.
Emily Corwin is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Gigantic Sequins, New South, Yemassee, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press) which were published in 2016. Her first full-length collection, tenderling was released from Stalking Horse Press in 2018 and she was a finalist for the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her manuscript, sensorium was chosen as an Editor’s Choice selection for the 2018 Akron Poetry Prize and is forthcoming with the University of Akron Press.