I discovered an accidental kinship between gastropods and gastrology while writing this piece.

One gives us snails and slugs—all softness, trail, and tender exposure. The other concerns the stomach—appetite, digestion, the body’s quieter forms of knowledge.

They don’t belong to the same category *exactly* but they do graze the same terrain.

Both return me to the belly.

To vulnerability.

To nourishment.

To the awkward, undeniable fact of being a creature with needs.

Maybe that’s part of what I love about snails—that they make embodiment so visible. They move at the pace of process. They carry their shelter with them. They leave evidence of having passed through. Nothing about them feels interested in transcendence. They are devoted to contact, moisture, appetite, survival—qualities that feel, in their own way, related to the emotional center of this poem.

I didn’t set out to write a poem about etymology, digestion, or soft-bodied endurance, but sometimes a poem knows its companions before I do.Tuesday (With Snails) moves through tenderness and discomfort, slowness and exposure—the body as both burden and witness.