Corinna McClanahan Schroeder

Girls splayed by boars
and bulls and swans.
A hoof jammed
into the small of a back,
...

I went alone, bared the hourglass of my back
to Big Richard whose fingers spelled T-H-I-S
...

Those mornings, after you'd gone to work,
I packed boxes and taught myself to name.
...

On school nights, Dewey's decimals guided
my cart's wheelspin through labyrinthine rows.
Near-sighted old men came in to read the Sun,
...

How lonely can she be driving subdivision
streets that cloverleaf and curl into cul-de-sacs,
where houses slouch in alternating shades
of brick and shadows tip across backlit blinds.
...

You swim to the next cove, the only act
of leaving you can take here in the water's
flow. Kicking away, you shred the lake
into heavy white spray. I clutch an orange raft,
...

my fingers pinching the radio knob,
the vents' hot blast and the window cracked,
his headlight's narrow arc. He speeds because,
six months in, he knows I like it. He wants
...

He stepped onto the porch and lit his pipe,
inhaled the scent of pine. The hail had sheered
the needles from the trees — the ground now lost
...

Follow the serpentine river roads
toward the Little Miami's lip. Pass through
the sycamore trunks, their whitewashed
limbs. See how they molt their skins.
...

The washer fills like a well, and she casts
them in again, delicates zipped into netted bags,
buttons threaded through their loops.
Cold waters purl and rise, bubbles frothing
...

Incongruent—her body there, walking
the hem of that interstate loop, then gone.
I've found the facts—the thermometer's
...