Free to a Good Home

Here's a shameful admission: just now, in the throes of an extended spasm of brainstorming, I wrote the line, "unlicked animals in balls." I was 900 percent serious, and even had a frisson of that Lightning Has Struck My High-Flying Genius Kite Once Again feeling as I did it. It took me a moment to realize how close I had come to tumbling over an obscene precipice into a creature porn abyss. It reminds me of a trend I noticed a couple years back for people to write about various aspects of nature--sun, moon, and stars, usually--"fisting" themselves. Remember that? Remember all that fisting? Did it perhaps begin with Anne Sexton and her snail?