Bill Smith
Slugs
Lastly I told her I once had a fat
white cat, soft and broad as a bale of wool.
One morning, autumn, the overgrown backyard
washed out and turgid from a sopping fog,
I glimpsed weaving flashes of white in the weeds.
I opened the back door.
The cat was covered with slugs; a chain-mail
of slugs had it stiff, belly scraping the floor.
The greased tubes curled and contorted wetly
as they writhed for a grip on the streaked fur
clotted by dew and slime into swathes of plaster.
Black and ribbed, like pinched lengths of hosepipe,
or nearly translucent, touched up with a sparse
sickly mottling. They were strange patches of night
itching and dragging back behind the eyes.
One blundered onto the linoleum,
floorsful of stickiness in a thin film.
I was already screaming, but the cat
tiptoed slowly, neck held down, to its box,
heavy and careful as with a big pain.
"Kill it," I yelled. "Kill it! Kill the cat!"
But there it crouched, totally still, alive
with silent horns, gripped, staring, occupied.
Page(s) 44
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