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47 Swimming in a Stock Tank Our grandmother has told us to keep an eye out for cottonmouths, which often ess across the coffee-colored water, serpentining pellet shots that plink the surface and sink unharmed. Instead, we’ve invented a game called turtle, we three boys, in which we float on our backs and, stripped naked, lift our hips as if the spade heads of our peachy prepubescent peters were breaching for air. The tank’s rim girds us crater-like, three motes in God’s good eye. He’s silent. The snakes steer clear. Cicadas hiss and rattle in the oaks. Each of us a sceptered isle in this other Eden, this demiparadise , we never think to look up at the sky or even out at the pasture, stay tuned instead to what we know, and what, through inklings, are starting to feel. ...

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