from 'She Named Him Michael' by Heather Rounds

The fair had first brought pieces of the world to Claire, long before Michael, back when she had a mother and father. She’d found herself inside a tent just as humid and red as the tent of Nature’s Mistakes. Rather than a headless chicken, a woman whose bones had not grown beyond her first year of life was the Mystery Finale. The woman lay sprawled across a tiny rose-colored chaise lounge. Paralyzed from such small, weak bones, she takes in the world—never having sat or stood said the Talker. Her quilt of skin, powder white, bunched over and around her and flowed beyond her twisted, flipped feet. Some fingers poked out from underneath, stiff and pin straight. Her chin and torso seemed one. But what is meant by possible. Who are we to say what should be said the Talker. Despite her stunted bones, her head had continued on to a full size and in her head lived an adult brain full of many facts. Over the head sitting over the brain came hair curled in brittle ginger sprigs inching out from all directions. She did not look real but She is alive! She blinked her small eyes as the living do. Her doughy cheeks warped up as she smirked. She looked at Claire. She smirked as the living do. She was alive and Claire didn’t know how one could be and not grow. How said Claire. This was how it was meant to be. World travelled and more valuable than a jewel. Full of jewels of her own. More valuable than most anyone or anything. She learned and saw and took in the world without ever having to actually move! Said the Talker. Claire reached her hand toward the quilt of skin, she reached in and felt for the jewels. She felt the jewels and moved them toward the open. They hit the open light and bled into the doughy cheeks that warped up as the small woman smirked at Claire. A moment rushed beyond the humid, red tent, beyond the little rose-colored chaise lounge, and there was only that moment.


Heather will be reading her work at WORMS on Tuesday, April 17.

"Excerpts from the collected papers of G. Stanley Hall" by Alicia Puglionesi

Six copies of some fears
A study of calms
The influence of the weather upon the activities of children
Paper on the reasons for the ticklishness of facial hair
The domain of fear
Textbook of nervous diseases
Paradoxes of the notion of danger
The fear of life
Paper on pragmatism
Paper on senility
Paper on the ability to laugh
Paper on consciousness, with footnotes
Article on mourning clothes
The habit of torture
Last page of a paper on some sort of meeting
Are the colleges doing their job?
Rough notes on pity
Paper with titles of various sociological categories
Paper on a new milk law
Paper on the steady increase in the appreciation of Jesus, with footnotes.
Bibliography of Sunday
Paper on the ideals that one sex has for the other
Some account of the vampires of onset, past and present
Note on the changes in the lectures
Why do we cry?
Paper on the past as an explanation for everything
Folder on woman
Paper on the psychic stimulus of death
Three pages of rough handwritten notes
Paper on fatigue
Paper on panics
Loose page of an unidentified manuscript
The feeling of being stared at


Alicia will be reading her work at WORMS on Tuesday, April 17.

Tuesday, March 27 -- Justin Sirois' FALCONS ON THE FLOOR Release Party w/ Alphonso Lingis & Ed Steck

WORMS couldn't be prouder to host the release party for Justin Sirois' Falcons on the Floor, a novel that follows two young men as they leave their home town of Fallujah on the

eve of the first Coalition siege!

Readings by Justin Sirois, Alphonso Lingis, and Ed Steck!

JUSTIN SIROIS is a writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. His books include Secondary Sound, MLKNG SCKLS, and Falcons on the Floor written with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. He also runs the Understanding Campaign with Haneen and co-directs Narrow House. Justin received several individual Maryland State Art Council grants and a Baker "b" grant in 2010.

ALPHONSO LINGIS is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Lingis has had wide success as a public lecturer due both to his captivating style of writing and also the performance art atmosphere of his lectures. During public talks he generally appears in costume or speaks amidst strange background music or recorded screams, often in total darkness. His books include Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984), Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), Phenomenological Explanations (1986), Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994), Abuses (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994), Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995), The Imperative (1998), Dangerous Emotions (1999), Trust (2003), Body Modifications: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (2005), The First Person Singular (2007), and Violence and Splendor (2010).
(adapted from Wikipedia)

ED STECK is a writer from Southwestern Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA. His work often focuses on surveillance and landscape through the direct confrontation with bureaucratic language in government, military, and corporate documents, such as the Wikileaks Afghan and Iraq War Logs. Ugly Duckling Presse will publish his book, The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation, in 2013. He has collaborated on publications with David Horvitz, Marc Handelman, and Wintergarten LTD. Most recently, West in Den Haag published A Time Stream in Spaces: The Cultic Parody of Time-Induced Capital as part of the Let Us Keep Our Own Noon group exhibition.

Tuesday, March 27 —— Doors 7:30, Reading at 8 —— FREE
(but bring $$$ for booze and FALCONS ON THE FLOOR)
@ the METRO GALLERY (1700 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD)
----WORMS is not responsible----

Untitled Excerpt by Linda Franklin

It is quiet at the river, except for the dogs. She walks, bent over like a gleaner,
plucking bits of broken glass from the sand or the water. She has a knack, perhaps
it is a talent, for seeing the particular shade of brown that is a small shard from
the shoulder or neck of a beer bottle, or for spotting a small piece of a plate or cup
amongst the small rocks. She feels the blood rush to her head, she mutters to
herself “Goddam people, broken glass, so much ... , goddam people.” She feels
terrible today. Everything seems to break.



Linda will be performing her work at WORMS on February 28.

"A History of Painting for Barnett Newman" by Alex Ventura

What are we going to paint,
now that the apples are cannonballs,
now that events are not predicated of any subject,
now that things in themselves
already amount to something without end,
in perpetuity?
To apple, and so on.



Alex will be performing his work at WORMS on February 28.

Tuesday, February 28 — Stephanie Barber, Linda Franklin, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, Alex Ventura

Celebrate Leap Day Eve at WORMS! We've got Stephanie Barber, Linda Franklin, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, & Alex Ventura!

LINDA FRANKLIN is a writer, illustrator, painter, sculptor, videomaker, editor, and creative writing instructor. She has always adhered to her father’screed: “Everything might come in handy ... someday.” Linda has been a men’s underwear saleslady, a window dresser, an art librarian, a waitress, a washtub bass player, a storyboard artist, a bike shop manager, and a freelance writer and editor. She has written and/or illustrated over 40 books, none of them fiction. Now she is only writing out of her head instead of a filing cabinet.

Look for her blog and videos by Googling her nom de vivre: barkinglips.

ALEX VENTURA is working on a trilogy of poetry, fiction, and drama titled Puerto Rico. The book of poems will be out this summer on Brooklyn Arts Press. His goal is to finish the novel ...by December 14, 2012, as his thirtieth birthday present. He is currently on the second chapter. After he writes the play, Alex plans to retire and devote the rest of his creative life to romantic love. He lives in Baltimore.

Tuesday, February 28 —— Doors 7:30, Reading at 8 —— FREE
(but bring $$$ for booze and books)
@ the METRO GALLERY (1700 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD)
----WORMS is not responsible----

"Her Skin Returning" by Laura Smith

Moving against, an engine into grain or ground, a sign sawing around the outside of thought like talk, like chaff or shell, as if the language were something to leave behind.

Left behind, longest trip, last night in the last city on earth or last summer, where we stayed and left a poor story in between the bed and the wall. In the space where memory grows.

In the last light the flicker said the slippest wind and narrative was built for such as these. Slight winds in slight rooms. Slight words, slight winds, the slight space where time grows smaller and blown bone through.

Time in the space between the bed and the wall expands, the room grown smaller. Where I found you is not where I think of you found. This has very little to do with language. Just another thing that occurs in time, like rooms, like moving, like stretching into spaces that with memory and time grow larger. Like her skin, returning, well-traveled, at dawn.

Laura will be reading her work at WORMS on January 24.

Untitled Prose Poem by Mande Zecca

I stood lost, playing host to a crowd’s dual dispersions. Violet duets in evening’s bombed-out air. O, nation! In your saltwhite robes. What good is my gull-winged capital when, thick with ticksex, the doves disperse? We asked for asphodel, got acres pitted with ash. Rangy pasturage. Dross. Then there’s the grain that nets the heart. That the dirt is holy. That it grits the skin. We are the grass the wind shakes through.


Mande will read her work at WORMS on January 24.

"First Transubstantial Terror Projection Poem" by Jeremy Hoevenaar

I want someone else’s terror. For instance
the Old man of the Mountain’s terror of inverted hospitals,
of empty bottles acting as sun-cataracts,
the pain in the back of a gust of wind.
His terror is also that his singing will be heard.
His terror is also that the Old Woman of the Mountain will turn
and metamorphose into a tree that is also a well.
His terror is also that this will not happen.
His terror is that what he thinks is always
the opposite of what will happen.
His terror is also the opposite of this.
His terror of loops. Loops
found in water, air, wood, dirt, and the entrails
of animals which terror dictates it is necessary to eat.
These terrors are his wizened and subdued brand of professionalism.

But these are not the terrors I want.
These terrors are too mythopoetic.
These terrors were present at the first twinning in
the dark of the first recognizably infinite thing.
These terrors are like a baby
who is also an eternal wizard of terror.
These terrors are too like the word
terror singing itself into a mythology only it
wants to hear about. These terrors play the moon
backwards and delight
to watch it grow cold cloven feet.
Feet that light upon the earth without a sound.

Terror is its own treatise.
Terror cannot conceive of itself
played backwards. Terror can however turn
the volume on itself way down and become
curiosity.

There is a story about terror I would rather not relate.

Terror is genuinely interested in the idea of a radical acceptance.
Terror knows there is a gap between an idea and an action.
Terror wants to catch everything in the river and bake it into a soufflé
and trade it to the Old Man of the Mountain for some of that good
soul-edifying moonshine.
Terror struggles with whether to multiply itself into a committee
or to sit quietly under a tree.
Terror is secretly a great admirer of respiration.
If terror had a treatise other than itself it would be a treatise pertaining
to the respiration of all things including ice, limestone, and osteoplasts.
Terror suspects the world is one long breath,
but is uncertain whether it’s in or out.

The Old Man of the Mountain has trouble breathing.
The Old Woman of the Mountain records her breathing on
a crude wooden device and plays it back to help her breathing sleep.

Terror writes proverbs with water on the big hot stones by the river
and waits for them to evaporate.

Terror wrote this: What hasn’t happened yet can’t fail.
Terror wrote this: Everything is full of chemicals.
Terror wrote this: Everything repeats if you hit the button that makes it repeat.
Terror wrote this: Not everything can be a birth or a death. Or can it?
Then terror wrote this: Not everything has to be a birth or a death.
Terror also wrote this: When the world is like a tent, it is a good world.
Then terror added: Keep the tent swept or chaos will move in and become
a second-rate action painter with irritable bowels and a never-ending
series of inconvenient erections.

Terror wrote this about chaos on the hot stones by the river:
Chaos is only depression when severely over-caffeinated.
Terror pondered chaos and then wrote this:
If everything could see everything then the world would be a swept tent.

Terror wrote this: everything sees everything.
Terror wrote this: love is a symptom of watching what happens.


Jeremy will be performing his work at WORMS on January 24.

Tuesday, January 24 — Jeremy Hoevenaar, Adam Robinson, Laura Smith, Mande Zecca

More new writers and more long time favorites; now more than ever!

JEREMY HOEVENAAR has lived in Baltimore for 1 1/2 years. A small book of his poems, Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement, will be released sometime this spring. Some recent work ca...n be found in Sink Review, H_ngm_n., and Forklift, Ohio. Jeremy is a loyal acolyte of the Whole Arm Movement and a founding member of the Gestalt Horse Sense Society.

ADAM ROBINSON is the author of ADAM ROBISON AND OTHER POEMS and SAY POEM, which he self-published and self-awarded second place in the STUPID RIVER POETRY PRIZE. In 2005 he wrote and produced a horror play called THE PROFESSOR, in which a first-year associate professor attempts to teach his students about gothic literature by faking murders around campus -- and then the murders become real. Or do they? Adam runs PUBLISHING GENIUS PRESS and plays guitar in the rock band called COACH TAYLOR.

LAURA SMITH comes from Baptist preachers, dairy farmers, and tough Southern ladies. After a youth of fiery sermons and raw milk, she studied poetry at Naropa Institute and completed a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also produced a shadow puppet version of Alice Notley’s epic The Descent of Alette. Writing has recently appeared in Monday Night, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and various academic journals. She teaches poetics, African American literature, and creative writing at Stevenson University and leads gender and sexuality writing workshops at OutYouth centers and the International Drag King Extravaganza. Her work has been produced by the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Painted Bride Art Center, and the Cohen New Works Festival in Austin, TX.

MANDE ZECCA's poems have appeared in Cutbank, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Propeller, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a PhD candidate in English at Johns Hopkins. She lives in Medfield with her cat.

Tuesday, January 24 —— Doors 7:30, Reading at 8 —— FREE
(but bring $$$ for booze and books)
@ the METRO GALLERY (1700 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD)
----WORMS is not responsible----