House Story

by Susan Settlemyre Williams

I haven’t told you yet about the slugs
            and probably you won’t want to hear
but it was in that rented house I didn’t have the heart

to bring up sooner             with its unpopular
little rooms in their dowdy paint
and the bare plywood partition in the kitchen with the hole

I poked in it with my three-year-old curiosity that
            no one seemed to know how to mend
nor have I told you how the linoleum

                        curled up in disdain             and the yard
would grow only sandspurs             but how from the vacant lot
beside us and through our open windows

when the wind in the evening was right we’d catch
the aroma of Irving Funderburk’s pony’s
            turds

            how my parents seemed defeated
                        by it all and even I had no
joy in that house             and maybe you could stand to hear

this much             the mildew laying its gray carpet
in the dark corners of the kitchen
                        but the slugs—down in the crawl space

the four-inch-long humpbacks     with horns and leopard
spots     you won’t want to hear how they migrated
at night up the pipes and out through the drain

in our bathtub slicking the rusty porcelain             and glided
up its sides and down onto the tiles             how
getting up in the dark             I put my foot wrong             felt

                        the muscled jelly between my toes
and screamed and screamed
how I could feel my own mother’s fingers

wanting to draw back as she cleaned the mucus
            from my foot        how nothing in the world
would be clean again

and again             my parents were defeated
it seemed there was no cure    only
the revenge of salt poured on the slugs’

skins until they decomposed into pure
slime                            in fact into essence of slug
and of course for weeks afterwards

in bed half-gagging on moon-silvered pony pellets
I’d measure mollusk-creep                         out from the tub
across the hall             up onto my cot             then million-toothed

mouths beginning to sample my face
and slinking             their trails over my hair and my lips
until
            —and aren’t you doing this now?—

like a salted slug, I’d writhe
                                    inside my well-scrubbed skin.


Susan Settlemyre Williams is associate literary editor of Blackbird.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, and The Cream City Review, among other journals.  Her manuscript Ashes in Midair was a finalist in the 2004 Tupelo Press first book competition.  She grew up in the Carolinas and has lived for 35 years in Richmond, Virginia.  She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is retired from law practice.