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.

CORINNA MCCLANAHAN SCHROEDER received her MFA from the University of Mississippi and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award in poetry, and her poems have been published in numerous journals. She lives with her husband, Matthew, in Los Angeles, California.