Ohio Railroads is a long poem—in essay form—with origins in the author's memory of a dream in which one of his parents died and the other, in response, sent forward a warning in what may have been the persona of the departed one. Ohio Railroads explores the peculiar weight of the dream and accounts for some of the measurement of the accessible world. The place of exploration is the several neighborhoods that comprise black Dayton (neighborhoods cut into big triangles by the train lines) and also "big Ohio" itself (with its mythologies of settlement and retreat and migration, its heroes, and its weather systems).