Playground Slugs
Why did the boys want to kill
my slugs?
A recompense?
For being born pot-bellied
and sold to war?
Their lives already claimed
by television and politicians
to die for what I would become:
A creature who would know
the sexual reproduction of gastropods.
They intertwine inverted
penises for an external sperm exchange.
Their bodies seethe in an
opal foam, slow and tender
against these
bleating and bucking,
in a chain-linked
playground of the co-op elementary.
The rot hollow of a fallen
tree, removed for a basketball court,
was more teeming
more inviting,
than the rainbow, plastic equipment,
as alien and twisted
as DNA.
I picked away at the bark,
which splintered beneath my nails,
fingered the tangy mosses.
I coveted
a trio of slugs.
All daughters and sons.
A yellow, a brown, and one
with a lonely eye stalk
that couldn’t have been plucked by me,
but may have been,
no wait, it was definitely
Jonah.
The tree was my slugs’ home
and sustenance,
like eating away at a womb.
The bees grinded
with fever in the
honeysuckle that tried to breach
our fences.
Here the boys scrambled
but never struck.
Horseplay is not permitted
within playground limits.
Instead they drag their sharpened sticks
along the gravel courtyard.
The clinking rocks shout against the bees.
Each species arrogant in their purpose
and loud.
I wanted to trace my children’s
slugslime with my tongue, so
I drooled on the bark.
Wiped my sweat away with
a stained, secondhand t-shirt.
Look! I secrete!
The boys looked too,
gathered closer.
They with their sticks,
taunted us, threatened death,
still at a safe distance
because they knew
not to anger a mother.
I glared and called them bullies,
and that seemed to be enough
to send them chasing after
something else small and spineless.
The slugs still flinched at
my touch.
The yellow one, wary,
puckered, and belched.
Maybe my slugs knew then
or always knew
I kept a packet of salt in my pocket.