I learned to fix a specimen with pins
in hardened wax inside a sardine can
and slice the length of speckled gray-brown skin,
its slime diffused by beer. Lab alcohol
would leave them rigid, said the biologist,
who’d promised this would be one science project
the other home-schooled kids, the prudish moms
would not forget—and so we drowned the slugs
in Miller Lite. I pulled the mantle back
and made a slit, used tweezers to extract
the tiny shell, a pinky fingernail,
reminder of their closest, shellbound kin.
Next I pinned aside the body wall,
revealing pebble shapes—peach, violet, sand,
the oblong organs nestled in their places.
Who knew they’d be so colorful inside?
I labeled aorta, lung, albumen gland,
hermaphroditic duct meandering
the body’s length, combining male and female.
With a lot of luck, he said, I’d come across
a pair of them, dangling deep in nighttime woods.
He’d seen them once. I wanted this so badly
I saw it too: as they had found each other,
I would find their gleaming form, draw close as imperceptibly they recreated
each other, either from either. In the lab,
I watched one slug’s foot ripple across the glass
of its aquarium. When two of them
decided, he had said, they set out on
a stately trek together up a tree trunk,
their pedal glands secreting slime to smooth
the path, then found a safe, high span of branch.
They circled each other, making a silver crown
of mucus over bark, moved close to lick
each other’s mantles with their radulae
and oral tentacles, laid ring on ring,
over minutes, over even hours,
till the mass was strong, and they began to exude
a double-stranded rope of sticky mucus,
thick enough to hold the weight of two.
They dropped—descended into empty air,
bobbing as the pliant rope held firm,
and each extended from the gonopore
(a tiny hole at the side of the head—I’d seen it,
had penciled in its name in careful script)—
a flared, white penis unlike anything
I thought of when I thought of penises.
It twined around the other’s, making a sphere
itself flanked by the fluted penis combs:
a space for each to take the other’s sperm.
When they were done, they climbed up through the air,
ingesting the rope as they ascended it—
for once, leaving no trail. They reached the branch,
cleaving the crown they’d made, as within each one,
sperm moved from retracted penis toward the eggs,
which traveled down to meet it as the slugs
slid over limb, trunk, ground, their ways diverging
as they sought a place—the V between two roots,
between a rock and soil—to lay a mass
of pearly eggs to hatch, in time, as slugs.
Grooved feet gliding over the earth—they left
a trail of slime and kin, impermanent trace
of where they’d been and how they came to be,
whose human complement no one explained
with such a lack of fear or innuendo,
such wonderment. Transported, I saw them live—
adorned with ruffled combs and white penes,
suspended in moonlight—glistening, mottled bodies,
slow aerialists on their gloss trapeze.