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.