Greg Scott Brown Intersection My nephew, thin as gruel born a certain sort of genius: the kind who can name each conjoined street-set picoandsepulveda, poncedeleon/peachtree from here to Omaha, then beyond whatever is beyond that. Or, how many years till my birth date repeats the precise day of the week I was born tuesdaytuesdaytuesdaytuesday and the number of times this will happen till I am dead. Wishing to forget all that, I've no use for these new revelations. My nephew does, and endlessly extols the soundness of such bland and blatant truths since one lone mode of knowing colonized his brain. Well-meaning adults say eat too many of those hot dogs and you'll turn into a hot dog and here my nephew writhes like someone set aflame because it actually hurts— the intemperate ardor of figurative speech. So, when he jumps up in my lap, fashions the hair on my forearms into countless, involuted curlicues, and says, with flinty conviction: you know, no one is this hairy, except, like, monkeys or dogs, or something I know no one's love can help him find where to pinpoint truth along the great, unmapped crisscrossing of emblem and fact.

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