North of The Santa Maria River
Jeffrey Alfier

To put knives in their thirst, Conquistadors
named rivers for saints, though earlier tribes
once swore this flow was the tear of a god.
This is where the Indian gift shop stands
where you buy your wife turquoise souvenirs
for your twentieth anniversary.

The girl working the counter tells some drunk
another tribe's land-grab makes wind foreign,
while your eyes dream her skin inviolate,
a smoothness tinged like suns ever-setting,
as she haunts your road home to Gila Bend.

What won't hurt your wife is what she won't see:
at night, while she is lying below you,
your mind shape-shifting that Indian clerk
until clenched eyes see another body.

Nonetheless, you finish making love, smile,
say 'I love you', and slide down beside her, 
the way it seems it's been done forever,
the mind in traffic of opportune souls
like asps on the breasts of Cleopatra.

Driving Up To Red Flag
Jeffrey Alfier

Younger guys can fly the jets to Nellis,
you're a colonel, and need your own car...

The wife says a prospect of traffic jams
makes you exit west at Casa Grande.
But perhaps it's the way deserts dream lightning
in the beautiful ache of wilderness,
that keeps you from driving on through Phoenix.

As this road becomes a dead reckoning,
Mark-82 bombs slam south behind you,
churning scree on Goldwater Bombing Range
and bantering the Gila Bend Mountains.

Storms make this valley too green to believe,
where tires carve dust that floats like a ghost ship
to lure your brow pensive as you drive north.

You direct your mind to tasks before you:
airspace blocks and radio frequencies,
forces' bed-down, and air tasking orders,
live-fire day for cluster munitions.

The Vegas skyline eclipses these thoughts.
You forget a child's foot can arm a mine.

Rhyolite, Nevada
Jeffrey Alfier

Volcanoes left an afterbirth of wealth
wolves couldn't use, but it became a town
a millionaire once bought to wrench the ore
from earth's daily tons, incredible now
as the ice cream parlor some countess built
before panic would trip miners and whores,
while schools and banks were whispered into ghosts.

Today, ravens eye larks on thermal drafts
with all the uneasiness of pirates,
arcing the railroad depot long foreclosed
to whiskey-riddled men's rumors of gold.

A bank's vacant window sifts cloud and sky,
an aperture in the palm of the sun.