When we were babysitting, Georgette and I found her cousin’s Playboy—the shock of all that skin airbrushed into gorgeous forgery, oiled until it was ice-shiny. The cool detachment of the pages, the warmth between our legs as we stared. Would our breasts ever grow as big as theirs? Our pencil eraser nipples smudged away what our minds scribbled. Silence, giggles, silence again. We gorged on pie left in the fridge unable to speak about what we had seen, except for one crude “orgy” cartoon, a circle of earthworms, crotch to mouth, end to end, like an ouroboros, the vocabulary word that looked plural but was singular, the snake that ate its own tail.

Georgette’s cousin and his wife came back from their date tipsy, but we got into the backseat of his car anyway. He asked if pretty girls like us had boyfriends yet, his eyes filling the rearview mirror. I wondered if the woman who nursed and burped her daughter at home knew about the Playboy stashed behind the record albums. I wondered if he’d throw the magazine away when their baby started to walk. The cousin began to sing with the radio, and we did too, as though we were catching his drunkenness the same way we’d catch a cold. “I want to kiss him,” Georgette whispered in my ear. “That would be incest,” I whispered back. Georgette said, “Not if I kissed you first. Then it would be an orgy.”

for M.C.

Mourning doves on the cedar planters I made last year
cooing and shitting like they were invited
to remind me I’m alive by the sun climbing the mountains
a little more to the north every day. Pulling out a bent nail

early and not angering it into place like I would have
when I was ten. Ocracoke being hard to get to

with its root beer floats and stories of shipwrecks I survive
every time. A lover who is sexy counting your lonely ball

over and over in the seventeen languages she knows
to count to one in. Blood delivering oxygen to the garden

of my body. The shed I’m building for shovels and wood
and shadows. The poem I’m building for my mind

to have a window to look out of. My mother

coming home from the hospital with third stage
liver disease instead of fourth, with a partially
collapsed lung instead of an announcement in the paper.
That two balls means you’ve been carrying a spare. I knew

this guy who had cancer, they kept cutting chunks of him out,
he’d return with absences inside and build a birdhouse
for each one, his mornings surrounded by the most musical air
he could breathe. Beyond such diligent fury

to live and the obsession of atoms to cloud in the shape
of my wife’s face and the moon following us with its slow
winking eye and the word Scheherazade sounding like slipping naked
down a water slide and lightning being a show-off with the spiky rivers
of its artistry and tractors bringing us wheat with steel
that could have been rifles and the ferocious salvation
of chemo and the cool breeze that just rose a hand to my face
and said, get on with it: beyond these things, there’s nothing more

than more of these things, in my experience, from where I sit
wondering if you’ve leaned a little to one side
since the operation and will tell your children
of your ghost ball decades from now and that you were afraid
you wouldn’t have the chance to meet them but then woke
and crawled out of the cave of anesthesia and the world
asked you to stay and you did.

In which the transformer heaves-projectile from the telephone pole.

In which the pole snaps awake—its miter box-guts emptied out

over an oscillating fan. In which atomized rot rains

atop the Crabapple’s pet name-pheromones, in which nobody notices.

Creation song in which electrified shrapnel voids:

Bedazzled yard gnome, limestone garden ornaments. Remote control

Ferrari, real life-Range Rover, in which somebody notices.

Creation song in which six kids crowd around pigskin

curious, the tallest boy prodding the ball with a stick.

Creation song in which your online bank account is unavailable.

In which your exquisite 60 inch flat screen is an HD plastic heap.

In which the matchstick feels Paleolithic & you could be making love.

Creation song in which unattended sparks sizzle along a chain-

link fence. In which everyone heads for the gates.