After the episode “Hang the DJ” from Black Mirror
We sit with each other with devices tolling,
on a hill of lungwort. We are subscribed,
allocated. We must proceed. To not would
contravene, we must comply in it, comply or
banishment. To participate is to make advances,
under a gable roof, under gathered data recalibrating.
I make advance, under a lancet archway, against your
abdomen, honeyed—in pavilions by a digital lake,
with trumpeter swans, foil balloons, a procession
of others, others also incarnated, carnal to the touch.
for a duration, the simulation suspends—it’s up to us.
We scale the incline to indeterminate grids, outside
the application, out of this place for this ever,
rampant in that noise you make.
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.