From "Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement" by Jeremy Hoevenaar

5

Shake the box and the contents will tend

towards nonsense, likely a sort you’ve seen

before but no less charming for all their quaint

pastel catastrophizing and cornered

exhortations of hunger for a polished significance.

If gravity didn’t exist it would

be necessary to invent it. I’m doubtful

that necessity exists as anything but an illusion.

I winter in justification and summer in testimony,

an evolution audible in the tremendous ripping

apart of some dangerously complacent attitudes.

Like: maybe I’ll have a child just to prove I’m not one.

Like: and now for my carefully practiced hearse face.

Jeremy Hoevenaar will be performing his work at WORMS on November 23.

"It Entropies Us" by Chris Mason

I push my glasses onto my nose
I rub behind my ears
I blink
Maybe I forgot to lock door
Middle of night a mechanism near the bed

is not permitted to be touched

Night contraptions connect basement

to floor boards to strings around the room

Wake up, body connected to the house!
Wake up, mind imagining integral structures!
Crack in sidewalk next to foundation
Curved gutter rusty, how do that?
House shifting, window won’t open
Unseen ceiling peeling paint
What about that work you did on the siding?

Moot!

What about that excellent floor job?

Moot!

What about the refinished bathroom?

Moot!

Newton’s 2nd Law of Thermodynamics:

Stuff put together comes apart

Chris Mason will be performing his work at WORMS on November 23.

"Stories Around People" by Joseph Young

An Event

Facebook lived in midtown, for there the people and windows shone like water. Though it would board the bus—1 day—and ride to the sea, where people said words like sea and where the city shone in the waves and the fish were sidewalks and windows.

Bolt

In the night, the house where Octopus lived burned to the ground, all the letters and poems a curled ash. The other books patted its shoulder and gave it roses and tea. It stood admiring the sky and thankful.

A Labor

You do not understand, vacuum said, it’s never been like that between us. In its jar, it knew this, seized it.

Joseph will be performing his work at WORMS on November 23.

"Inaudible Elegy" by Matthew Smith

Dumbstruck the afternoon I heard Mark Linkous
had scissored through his life’s indifferent knot,
I fell back, hard of hearing, on the hours
you and I listened, both awake and not,
to his bright music, taking it for ours.
Young still, those lisping songs are all that link us,

We, who ruined sheets to “It’s a Wonderful Life,”
the song, then the whole record, which we knew
better than one another’s mislaid clothes,
who sprawled in loveless postures we thought new,
talking of shades not lightly drawn to a close,
like good George Bailey’s in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Such whimpers through the past’s thin walls I hear
rarely now, though the skylit rooms we leased
back then felt paid for, white-washed, stationary
shelters the brisk earth owed us. Not the least
detail remains, not even the stationery,
on which I now write nothing. Take it, here.

Matthew Smith will be performing his work at WORMS on November 23.

"I'm Thinking of My Mother" by Rupert Wondolowski

the struggle of the flesh

how she asked if there was something she
had to do about the trees outside

the hospital

the twin towers hadn't fallen yet
Bush hadn't destroyed the world
but there was a huge brownish-red
pool of blood just sitting unattended
in the middle of a hallway that
ran through
what was supposed to be a reputable place

our questions to the doctors were
met with the disdain of video store clerks

of all the things she'd forgotten
my name our names, the names of all
the flowers she'd tended for all her
life, she looked up at the tv news
and spoke the name of the scumbag
who killed his wife, dumped her
in the ocean
and led everyone on a merry suburban chase.


Rupert Wondolowski will be performing his work at WORMS on November 23.