"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----