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.

Distant, growling, thunder woke me
from the sleep of nothingness.
A man was staring out the bay window
into the glimmering lightning.
His back was faintly red
in the light of the digital alarm,
3:30 am. I am not dreaming.
He stands and turns to look at me.
I am naked on my bed. He has
a mask over his face –
the hyperbolic smile from old theater.

He tells me he is here
to replace the owl who ate the lice.
You mean mice.
No, lice,
the lice of your poison dreams.
I don’t dream.
No, you don’t, not anymore, that is my job,
my day job actually.
Really I’m a musician.

The man is well dressed:
black linen suit, white shirt, red tie.
I go to him and touch his hand.
It is sand. I unbutton his shirt.
He is made of the wet warm sand
of my childhood.
I ask him what he has done with the owl.
I am also the owl, he tells me,
but he does not look like the owl.

I think I know you,
I think you are here on purpose.
Yes, he answers.
I am on purpose. The owl was by accident.
He let you dream,
which led to the great sadness.

I stick my finger deep into his sand chest.
I feel the warmth of my childhood
flow up my arm, days at the beach.
He takes away the mask,
showing the back of his head.
He walks away.

I lie down on the bed
and contemplate the great sadness.
The day I lost my identity,
the honor I worked for.
I always thought it was greed
or bad judgment.
The psychiatrist said
wrong place, wrong time.
Could it really have been caused by dreaming?
I fell back into the deep sleep
of nothingness.

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.

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.

I met him on Bourbon Street one year
at Mardi Gras.
We both had professional cameras
and were, of course,
aficionados of the female form
and any part thereof.
We began a great friendship
sealed in margaritas, artistic photographs,
and curb-side puking,
before I even knew
he was a famous diamond cutter
in Antwerp.
I mentioned
that I bought mine in a pawn shop
without thinking this might bring offense.
No, no, he said. I must correct you slightly.
You bought it in
the pawn shop of the human heart.
You see, I imagine that
with brutal equanimity
in every facet that I crack.
In the speed of light,
slowed down dramatically by tight-packed carbon,
I must symbolize heroic virtues.
Every glint of piercing light reflects
wisdom and constancy.
The diamond cutter’s eyes must see
each stone with the heartless zeal
of a perfectionist with pimples.
He must create a crystal whose sanctity
cannot be sullied by
the truth become cliché.

–Bobby Steve Baker,
Numbered Bones
Accents Publishing

More from Bobby Steve Baker:

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

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.

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.