When spiders erupt from the warm hollow
a man tells a story. Halfway down a hill
between three brothers’ house and the park where ghosts
shoot up in the centre of the oval
there’s a house, double-block, yellow brick.
It’s for orphaned and homeless youths. At night
– any night – twenty kids sleep there. No strict
rules can stop it from sounding like a hundred, like
a Slipknot concert. The exiles find new shadows.
The men roll the logs into the last campers’ pit.
Twice in the brothers’ childhood, the house goes
up in flames. Cops comb its yard for knives. For bits
of evidence because these kids are bad.
They steal one brother’s Razor scooter. They’re bad.

They steal one brother’s Razor scooter. They’re bad
thieves – the two younger brothers see them
from their bedroom, tell their older brother, who’s had
enough and leads them down. Twigs, kerosene,
and three 18V leaf blowers and it’s blazing,
a mountain range whose peaks scratch the dark sky
of gum canopy and dark sky. They sedate him
with words, calm voices, or try, the carers: why
risk arrest over this? The man recalls
the woman saying, I’m speaking in a calm voice.
Chanting it. A spell. But there are walls
she bruises then, backing inside. Her voice
like the TV cabinet glass he puts
her through. The boy from a good home. Voids her.

What did the boys from a good home lose, shed, void
that day? Not the older brother, but the
ones on the street who summoned him. The boys
who saw a woman valued less than a scooter
at an age when the worth of things was molten
glass for heroes to blow. It’s the world,
one man says. This fire’s the world and when
the fireworks go off later, it’ll be all
our evolution reaching its end point –
bright lights and explosions. Ginger steeps
in cast iron, drugs strike blood, charcoal anoints
a lentil stew, which dissolves the man’s story.
Talk moves on. A herd eating sweeter grass.
One man’s dog pulls a roo bone from the ash.

One man’s dog pulls a roo bone from the ash
and it turns to spiders, which turn to ash
on the younger brother’s eyelids, to ash
in the middle brother’s memory settling
when the younger brother comes, asks, Remember
when you went down the hill to find the boy
who’d thrown a hot dog at me? Remember
kicking his door till he answered, joined
in calling himself what you called him, licked
my shoes? The middle brother had forgotten
himself back to an innocence the quick
of which is fire, innate combustion.
Around the fire, the men talk skin-to-skin
touch in the early months, so love burns in.