Robert Bohm

Torrid sun pounding sandstone west of the Moapa
reminded Rachel of wind howling off the frozen bay
through wallboards into what was left of papa’s heart.
The house, older than he was, finally was torn down
by the township, then reconstructed
in her head where, if the kitchen faucet broke, it didn’t
matter, just as long as she could listen
to his stories about the mother
she’d never seen.

She understood the desert, the heat’s status
as the ice’s other side.

Wedged like an unbudging chuckwalla between two rocks, her mind
held its place.

No matter what she wanted, this was what she got:
when the dry wind battered the dune primrose’s white petals
she shivered, feeling the flower’s seizure, how it convulsed
like a sand rat bitten by a rattler
or like John Clark who in 1915, hiding under his buggy
to escape the heat, ripped
his shirt to shreds in a dehydrated delirium
before dying in the Mojave a half mile from a well.

One night at work, as focused
as the ancient carver who chiseled a flute-player
into a boulder west of Logandale,
she reinvented “Fever” in a tawdry hole a few blocks
from The Flamingo:
You give me fever when you cactus me,
fever when you make my love-cave bleed,
fever when your Nazi oven
makes ashes of my needs.

Bead-stringers’ voices in the cliff dwellings further south
are what she heard as she sang that night.
“The old grammars, they’re what we should think about,”
she told Hakim, the piano player, following the last set.
Later she wrote in her notebook
“I’m too thin. I should drink more milk.”

She gave these details after breaking the news to me:
“Papa died last year.”