“Heat” by Bobby Steve Baker

There is a guitar inside the distance of the house,
soft classical baroque, a fugue.

Over the desert from the irrigated lawn,
the Sierras gather up horizons deceptively close.

Alone with a martini in my hand,
a pimentoed olive

floating/sinking.
I despise pimento.

This one moans it is the penis of a dog
and snares rabid sexual power.

I eat it. A woman, very thin and wispy
comes out of the abode house.

Ancient but cut and stuffed to appear much younger,
she joins me speaking, You smell like a dog in heat.

Males don’t or maybe always are, I deflect.
In any case it’s odorless.

She says she is not a male and so can smell
what she likes, pheromones perhaps.

She is the soul of the cities, islands,
and does not feel the desert as a life force.

She does not look with longing to the mountains
as I do just then.

When I look back she has changed into a pimento,
and in a moment, swallowed, gone.

–Bobby Steve Baker,
Numbered Bones
Accents Publishing

Bobby Steve Baker was born in Ontario, Canada in 1951, but has lived and practiced cosmetic surgery in Lexington, Kentucky for many years. He holds an MFA degree in Poetry from National University and has published in various literary journals, including Ann Arbor Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and Grey Sparrow Journal. In 2009, his poetry in tinfoildresses was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Bobby grew up in a home where poetry was ever-present but began to write seriously only in the past few years.