The Seventh WaveEverything I need to hear
the slug churns out
in its stream of glitter:
Eat shit and remain impeccable.
Burma Road is for napping.
Mucous is sacred.
You don’t even try at it.
***
I squat over each slug—
the brunettes, the spotteds,
the bananas, the longs
and lengthenings, the stout
defensives and adolescents.
This nubbin rests in a coil,
ready to sick with its serum.
This medium slow-munches a dandelion leaf
with its 27,000 rough-toothed radula tongue.
Who gets to adulthood like this?
This gangly with freckles books it,
coating the sand
in sparkly pronouncements of slime.
Fuck outta here.
Mine.
***
The slug produces up to six cups of mucous a day.
I used to be wetter.
Lube will do, and does,
but there’s no compliment like a flood.
***
No splat so gelatinous as
the many membraned flat broken
by bike tire or boot tread.
Blasted throwaway
re: my slug darlings and them being killed.
Who gets to be laid out so humbly?
***
The Sarlacc does.
When I grow up I want to be
that gaping maw of the earth,
The Great Pit of Carkoon,
part antlion, part lamphrey,
wholly barbed vagina tyranny.
Every enraged-to-bloodlust otherworldly ever.
Cue the squall
of its open throat.
That’s me.
See: my second mouth.
***
When I grow up I want to be
descendent of the nudibranch,
heir of the recently emerged from ocean.
I want to feast on comets.
I want to digest over millenia.
I want to do interesting things with mRNA.
So many have I eaten.
***
Splatter of guts,
the russet smear
of cleared roadkill, the swamp, the pus, the muck.
At long last the latitude of my grin
breaks my mouth cyst,
unspools the rotten, ripe
rope of infection
my tongue follows.
That’s me.
I swallow.
Notes:
I took the title “The Long Slow Suck, The Murk and Ooze” from the following sentence in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: “It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze.”
I attribute “Fuck outta here” to Portland Trailblazers Power Forward Carmelo Anthony, who regularly uses the imperative when boxing out for a rebound.
Lauren Mallett (she/her/hers) is a poet, teacher, birth doula, and mushroom forager. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Passages North, Fugue, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals. The ecological imperatives of reconnection, embodiment, and regeneration ground her writing. She lives on the occupied homelands of the Clatsop and Chinook tribes, also known as Oregon’s north coast.