Inked: Poems

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
w...