My love is cochleate. I await the slow reveal of that which is hidden, always revisiting the dark side of the moon as it changes phases. I trace the spiral. The disorienting turns swallowed by the whirlpool of my mind, drowning in the wet slime of my lover’s gyrating tongue. The snail throws his darts: I love you— like salt spilling. I recoil, retreating into my shell. My past is a pest. Memories reemerge like snails during heavy rains. Remembering those nights that spiraled out of my control: wishing for an escape as he spoke in circles. His words disorienting like an infection of snail fever during a flood. Swelling waves twisting my tongue into silence. He released his shame into my quiet weeping, salt stinging dousing me in the sorrow of our marriage bed like a fern beneath the waterfall of his greed. I made my escape, circling as the condor does above the throat of the canyon where the currents whirl like the vortex of an eddy, their funeral in the sky after they feast on the dead. Death spiral. Expanding as it moves through time, hoping for space to breathe in this helical existence. I resign to the deliberate glide of a snail. The wise walk counterclockwise, a journey leading back to source, movement from the inner manifesting to the outer. A glimmer of light shines onto the sacred spiral.