In this month's Poetry Corner, we are featuring a poem by Cortney Davis who served as Bethel Poet Laureate from 2019-2021. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently "I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New & Selected" and "Daughter." She is the author of three award winning memoirs and co-editor of three anthologies of creative writing by nurses. Honors include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, three CT Commission on the Arts Poetry Grants, the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize, the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, a gold medal Ben Franklin Award, a Tillie Olsen Creative Writing Award, and two CT Center for the Book Awards. Her poems, essays and short fiction have appeared in Last Stanza, inScribe, Poetry, Hanging Loose, Bellevue Literary Review, Nostos, Hamilton Stone Review, CALYX, Intima, Witness, Rattle, The Sun, Hudson Review, and other journals and anthologies.

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Wearing Earrings Again after the Covid Pandemic

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Once my favorite bling, but what was the point that year 

when all I did was pace the house, bake new recipes, 

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teach my husband gin rummy and watch every movie

I thought we'd missed. But now, masks tucked away,

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immunizations up to date and my one bout of Covid

months ago, I open my jewelry box. Those, I think, 

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point the post at my earlobe, adjust the angle of my arm, 

aim and miss, wonder if the holes closed 

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when the world closed. Deep breath. Try once more 

and in it goes, a bit reluctant after all the time ignored. 

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So I vowed to wear earrings every day, each morning 

choose a shape, a color, muse about who 

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might want them when I'm gone. The posts slide 

smoothly now; I could slip them on even in the dark. 

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Someday I might select the earrings I like best, 

never take them off, just in case the world crashes again―

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a virus leaps from monkey to man, a flask breaks 

in a foreign lab or some distant asteroid hits,   

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blinks out our blue planet until every day is midnight―

at least then I'll be prepared, and glittering.

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