ALT NUDES. 1. I was not more than five. A girl in the fields had shown me what girls have down there, but only a glimpse before our parents were around us with their hoes, so for all the years of childhood and on into adolescence, I had only that one clue, and nothing to do with it but read, pouring myself into the classics, prying at the boulders of titles that seemed apt. The Secret Garden? The Anatomy of Melancholy? In the glass office at the back of the stacks, Mrs. Floyd Baumgardner, our skunk-haired Daughters of the Confederacy bibliophile, clipped genitalia throughout the Renaissance while I glossed our badly printed local daily. The buxom starlets in the drive-in ads, when I looked closely, would turn to dots. 2. The power to shock is a quality of modesty.

ALT An ex-Jesuit took me to my first titty bar. I wanted vision. Also, I wanted to chat. “My name is Fancy,” she said, “and I am going to dance for you.” Well, that is what they do down here, coming to the pink verge without ever shedding that last ribbon of flimsy silk, that sequined picket line of smiling evangelists, which is their only raiment and fashion. But where did she come from, and how to this end, a grown woman in a black string, not bad looking, from what I could see, with good bones, and the actual breasts. When I asked her last name, she said, “Strawberries.” 3. Eve, Helen of Troy, Mary, then Fatima: the oldest man at the bachelor party, I am not so old that I do not remember. When she pranced out in the letter sweater, it was eighth grade again, the day of the test on South America, the day of the night of the county basketball finals when Sally, the sprite a desk ahead of me,

ALT would leap bountifully in her great cheer and leap also in the fantasy life, making the names of the rivers all run together. 4. The lap dancer’s dress-up nudity is a doll. Geisha. Self-artifice. Professional candor. The way the stereotypical male poet’s penis is a feathered quill or mechanical pencil and he’s rewriting Hansel and Gretel. Also, she’s childhood’s fate whispering, “Rodney, don’t you remember me? Michelle. We met at Ron’s.” I don’t. But blush a blush that evolves from John Calvin, and watch her squirm. Part Mata Hari, part alma mater, her straddling act camouflages some chatter about her newest daughter. Her privates against mine like that, young men watching. Such is fame. Rodney Jones