My skin is tan/ My hair is fine/ My hips invite you/ My mouth like
wine/ Whose little girl am I?/ Anyone who has money to buy/ What
do they call me/ My name is sweet thing/ My name is sweet thing
Nina Simone

I am the central bone of bones,
cock-sure, intense, and critical.
Sometimes, day and night, I am the hold-tight
of this body to this soul; grounded
in the grinding deep, past superficial hips and lips
of want and weep and moaning for the moment
of the sweet release, the sweat to cease.

But I am deeper,
broader, more complex than harmonic fundaments of bone.
Twinned crests and loops, my symmetries
produce the marrow of life’s blood itself.
Not a protégé of God’s great plan
or evolution’s reproductive rage.

I take nothin’ I can’t get myself.
I work in sales.

What I do is sway and thrust, sway and thrust,
just enough, just enough,
to suck the paper juice out of a moneyed hand
in physical perfection and
then move on, and then move on.

–Bobby Steve Baker,
Numbered Bones
Accents Publishing

More from Bobby Steve Baker:

• Bobby Steve Baker has this Crazy Urge to Live
• “Homo Lupus Homini” by Bobby Steve Baker
• “There Is No Medicine for What I Got” by Bobby Steve Baker
• “Chaos, Clarity and Contradiction” by Bobby Steve Baker
• “Wild Game” by Bobby Steve Baker

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.