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.