Everything I need to hear / the slug churns out / in its stream of glitter
Author’s Note
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 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.
