Again-off
by Misha Honcharenko
My quietude of meeting death stumbles, the chair I’m sitting on is simply the trustworthy way of not falling apart. What is shaped as an essay or a place to talk about the body is an authorization of concern, of lust that conquers desolated whim; of mid-sentence exploitative hate to self. Meaningless sex shields to uphold. Scraps of a hill. Conclusive gazes, precarious offspring. Is it so hard to ask for a distant yet immediate grip?
My hostel is a haunted house: cries, thunder, fucks, gasping, screaming, beating and total inadequacy. Moreover, those entities they’re expanding, making me anxious. What is it to be alone after having a period of caretaking? Abandoning my own thoughts, my own pleasure, my own breath. Body is an irregular python. To restart life after losing my knowledge of welfare. It’s my own ward where I still keep staring and fear grief. I remember a quote from Charlie Fox’s brilliant book, This Young Monster, where he writes:
Queering the straight world is a form of revenge which proves that homosexuals can have their wicked way with modes that so often ignore their existence.
In a correlation to my peeks, I believe in justice toward consolation. When do I start to unlearn? How do I not be so rapid, overwhelmed and exhausted by the happening? Apricity, that warmth of a frozen place. My own place to masturbate, emphasize on the year, sob, sleep with distraught.
Turning off any glare or signs of care, it makes me guilty. Those gatherings of people in hospitals; a hospice. I remember using all of me to love and to care which feeds anyone but me. Swerves of a wind, to put the effort to the next anatomy. It’s a sudden string of stinging. Words of people I used to know. Mother’s love is uncertain and opening — it’s a release. Born innocent.
There is no lie in hibernation. My sleep shocks to the point of not knowing when happiness was occurring last time. A small talk of crash. Undermining analysis amidst cannibalistic obscenity. My own words eat me up. It’s not scripted. Fingerprints that splatter along sheets of paper.
My mother loved to see me smiling, my wooden acting. A queue doesn’t lack curiosity. Aftermath drowns in piles of death. Chantal Akerman wishes to have those long and precise moments of stillness. Of escaping the narration. Licking pre-existed commitment. And throwing myself into a new closet.
My Chest was Full of Eels, one of the titles of the greatest DJ-mixes from Mark Fisher. To set a land. Barely-conscious. What is a hallmark of a liminal space for the lonely and the estranged? Love is a mother.
Officially, my story of love is to be a doppelgänger. A torture.
Misha Honcharenko is a Ukrainian queer artist and writer. He started his Instagram profile as a form of art diary, combining weirdness in context of objects and landscapes, exploring himself via photography for over a decade now. Skin of Nocturnal Apple is his first poetry collection published by Pilot Press in 2023. Trap Unfolds Me Greedily is his upcoming debut novel published by SISSY ANARCHY—a platform exploring trans and queer anarchism—and will be released at Housmans Bookshop in London on 27 June 2024. It’s a gruelling read, an anti-novel, with a narrator that succumbs to new forms of grief whilst navigating the complexities of the immigration system, his queerness, war crimes, violence, whilst grieving the slow passing of his mother. His work has been written about in i-D, Worms Magazine, minor literature[s], and has been featured in all issues of SISSY ANARCHY.
It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.
Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.
Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.
Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare
Publication date: 15th February 2024 (Australia) / 1st June 2024 (UK)
Published in Australia and the UK by Worms Publishing
Fiction | Paperback with hand drawn dust jacket with fold-out map by Rufus Shakespeare
ISBN: 978-1-3999-7341-0
228 × 150 mm | 164 pages
£14.99 | $30.00
The ‘Artists who Write and Writers who Art’ Issue. For Worms 7 we’ve looked to our visual counterparts for some soil nutrients. We’ve wormed our way into the psyche of the artist, to bring you the ‘Artists That Write, and Writers That Art’ issue. Many of our subjects in the past have come into writing via non-traditional routes (filmmaking, curation, art, performance, podcasting, and so on), so it only felt right to cast a spotlight over those who have inspired our experimental literary practices so far. Not only those that use words within their visual practice, but those who use images to inform their writing. The reader, the writer, the artist, the activist, the poet and performer; they’re all here and they’re all worms.
In this mega worm (which is fittingly pink, for the first time somehow) you are in for a feast. Clem interview Helen Marten, Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily, Caitlin interviews actual art-writing icon Olivia Laing, Pierce talks to the profound Dr. Joy James, Philippa Snow gives us her thoughts on the act of writing art criticism (spoiler: it’s out her ass), and we have enough Derek Jarman content to keep you going for the rest of the year. We have some hilarious/insightful/weird/wonderful contributions from some of your favourite regulars too; including Jess Cole, Isabelle Bucklow, Sam Moore, Haydée Touitou, Estelle Hoy and many others.
Featuring
DIAMOND STINGILY, HELEN MARTEN, NICOLE RUDICK, NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, MARTINE SYMS, OLIVIA LAING, DR. JOY JAMES, JORDAN WEITZMAN, WU TSANG, DEREK JARMAN, SABINE MIRLESSE, MISHA HONCHARENKO, CHANTAL AKERMAN, JOANNA NOVAK, ANNIE ERNAUX, DAISY SANCHEZ, JENNA SUTELA, ANICKA YI, TUOMAS A. LAITINEN, STEPHANIE COMILANG & SIMON SPEISER, VALERIE SOLANAS
Contributors
HAYDEÉ TOUITOU, L SCULLY & LUCAS RESTIVO, LEE RAE WALSH, JESS COLE, ESTELLE HOY, PHILIPPA SNOW, SAMANTHA ROSENWALD, ISABELLE BUCKLOW, MONA GLASSFIELD, CLEM MACLEOD, SARAH WHITE, CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN, PAVIELLE GARCIA, IONE SAIZAR, CHANTAL JOFFE, SOPHIE DAVIDSON, PIERCE ELDRIDGE, VIOLET CONROY, ELLE PÉREZ, PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA, JACQUELINE ENNIS-COLE, MARY ADETURINMO, STEPH FRANCIS-SHANAHAN, SAM MOORE, BUG SHEPHERD-BARRON, DONNA MARCUS DUKE, SAM HOLTON BRADLEY, KITTY GRADY, FELIX PILGRIM, CICI PENG, HOLLY MILLS, THEA MCLACHLAN, ERICA GOULD, PAULA DUCAY AND INÉS GARCÍA, ELVIRA GARCIA, INÊS GERALDES CARDOSO, JODIE HILL, JEMIMA SKALA, MAURA SAPPILO, DELIA RAINEY
Founder & Editor in Chief: CLEM MACLEOD
Managing Editor: CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN
Art direction and design: CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN
Features Editors: PIERCE ELDRIDGE, ARCADIA MOLINAS
Contributing Editor: VIOLET CONROY
Printed by PAGEMASTERS
Publication date: July 2023
Published in the UK by Worms World C.I.C.
Magazine | Paperback
240 × 170 mm | 176 pages
