Inked

The poems in Inked chart a course of departure and return.  These are finely-crafted, musical poems, attentive to the world’s rhythms in an Ohio apple orchard, at a Midlands train station, in the throbbing life of the South. 

Instructions for Return


   Follow the serpentine river roads
toward the Little Miami’s lip.   Pass
   through the sycamores, their molting
whitewashed limbs.  These are curves
   I can still ride hard, roads
I can trace along a back’s bare skin.
   Feel that wind, saturated, undercut
with vespertine chill.  Let it frizz
   your hair.  Turn up the Smashing
Pumpkins or the Cowboy Junkies.  
   That’s river musk on your teeth.  See
how the lightning bugs burn their bulbs
   just ahead?  In the rearview, bats unstitch
your wake.  Now the humming bridge
   in your fingertips and thighs.  
Remember that darkening vein underneath,
   how it pushes and pushes toward
main stem waters.  The truss will bear
   your weight ten thousand times.