Corinna McClanahan Schroeder
Ohio Understory
for Karen Spencer who disappeared, age seventeen, from I-275 during the early hours of December 30, 1989
Incongruent—her body there, walking
the hem of that interstate loop, then gone.
I’ve found the facts—the thermometer’s
needle poised above freezing,
Friday night unraveling into something
not yet morning, an obstinate inch
of snow. Karen’s sister-in-law claimed
there was an argument, her Buick
pulling over, smack of the passenger door.
There was not wind, I know,
but the teeth of a fog and the sleeping
towns that skirt Cincinnati. Exits
for Loveland-Madeira, Wards Corner,
Route 28. A black tributary unwrapped
beneath a high bridge. Ten thousand
maples and locusts, just spindles in winter,
clutched the knuckled hills. No apparent
entrance, even now, into that understory.
The sister-in-law told police Karen sludged
north. A woman, a year later, put a shivering
girl of the same description heading south,
a red pickup with Kentucky plates braking.
What’s most certain is the mother’s speech—
“In my heart, I’ve always been sure Karen died
early that morning.” I was sleeping, that same
morning, in a farmhouse a few miles away.
I wouldn’t learn of Karen until years later,
but back then, age four, I could still accept
that some stories don’t end. A body there,
walking the hem of the hawkish woods—then gone.
Reading Edith Hamilton, 9th Grade
Girls splayed by boars
and bulls and swans.
A hoof jammed
into the small of a back,
a beak tightening
around a neck.
Girls sealed inside trees.
One girl, even, pulled
into a stranger’s car
and the mother left behind,
poppies wilting.
That winter, between bells,
upperclassmen boys
jostled me in the halls.
Their smell sharpened
to musk.
Their shoulders spread,
eyes dark as dried blood.
And that ache
in the pit of me.
In the parking lot,
every day at 2:55, engine rev
and muffler breath,
tires peeling out.
I stood on the sidewalk,
coat zipped high.
Bio
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is currently a Ph.D. student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California where she holds a Wallis Annenberg Endowed Fellowship. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Tampa Review, Copper Nickel, Cave Wall, and Linebreak, and she received a 2010 AWP Intro Journals Award in poetry and was a Ruth Lilly finalist in 2011. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Mississippi where she was the recipient of a John and Renée Grisham Fellowship.