Two Poems
By Melissa Lee-Houghton
Marriage in Seven Acts Each Containing Sadistic Lovers w/ Deafening Howls of Pleasure
I shall touch everything with my senses and make even the static objects vibrate with lust. Please never resist me or learn from my mistakes – there was a past time in which I was all throat and no joy but now I am all mouth and full hearted the whole skin leans over the edge of your consciousness threatens to jump and you catch me and all the words fall out and down into the pit. I’m so cat-like I’m a human failure, so glamorous lying in bed in snakeskin platform sandals, sleeping through the afternoon lined with a sickeningly delicious sweat, all my glands aching and all my tunnels filling with poise. Tunnel into my bed tonight or tunnel into my weaknesses, or tunnel into my despondencies, or tunnel into my inability to make prayers I am sanctity itself my darling don’t patronise me have you any idea how much brain it takes to make a fool out of you.
Erroneously enterprising fluke, you walk out into the fray in fact you dance out, you push your way through a thicket of buffoons and then you interrupt several people as they imagine they are a democracy of one. My daughter notes I seem not to notice physical pain. The emotional pain proliferates so exuberantly it’s hard to be anything other than a portal for all Hells and high waters. Saturn eating his sons becomes me eating a room full of sour auras and spitting them into poems that turn on a rack through our outrage. I’m completely besotted with you; what do I expect you to do with that? Well, you could have a good scan of my entire body until you hit on something you really like and make sure you exercise your right to make it sizzle with lack of control. I get so out of control you barely have to touch me what’s wrong with you I barely have to touch you and not that long ago a room full of male friends sat and watched you spontaneously orgasm sat alone on a green velour couch. One of the kindest of them put his arm around you but my God what the hell was that.
And Jim Jones rocks back and forth in a rocking chair on a podium made of milk-teeth, bares his teeth and shrieks kill the children. There are no men who can bear you. You are able to milk a prostate from fifty feet. You are talented and go from emotionally overwrought to street-smart in three seconds. Do entertain this; you will simply never have this much fun again. A chronic belief in the honourable nature of direct assault.
My senses touch on all things, all words fly into the heartcollapse of my feelings, I fly into the sensations and get no sleep. Reeling in a single bed of sexual plight, a montage of psychoanalytic archetypes and every nerve nailed to its own architecture of I Want.
As my stomach fills with a change-of-heart plus Valium I become faceless at the edges.
What makes you think of me. I never think of you.
I think of you all the time. You think of me often. You think of me when you’re alone. You think of me when someone is boring. I think of you when I’m seen. Get a long look now, I’m not coming back. Unimpressed by my inability to not press my mouth against his neck and push all of my tense and volatile flesh against him as though I might dissolve or melt or cease to exist in essence or substance.
Now fuck off and fly over St Petersburg like the fragrant witch you are.
Be complicit in all complicity.
Laugh at your father’s pre-intercourse and post-coital failings.
This time I win. I win.
Yes stretch your arms out like that so I can bury my face in your chest.
Stretch wide and be like the sunset just a shock of impulse raving over your lack of presence.
His hair comes away at the scalp in my grazed hand to memorialise the impulse to dissolve and be corroded.
Yes I’m present to you in a way no one is. Yes well go back and say no more about it. Clasp my wrist in your sleep and pour hot oil over my face. I am no more. I have gone down ingeniously. The neverending nature of true love is that it must be recognised to justify killing itself. All these deaths and none of them ours, or mine, and I scar and stare into the pits of your eyes, a house situated in your psychic retentions, no one cares, and I can’t save you. She can save, I’m Mary Magdalene is all, and I heave with sobs over the apex of your ejaculations – yes, I can do almost anything and you want none. Frying in a particular heat and everyone in London baking but not simmering quite as intensely as this little stallion I imagine I’m more masculine than I am as a way through being feminine and no one wanting to bask in that. It’s too hot for stockings but easy to have sex in public as we’re barely clothed. You are the worst most highly sexed person in this lockdown of literati and shame. The sauvignon blanc is really testing my will to live the longer I stand here being impolite the more the stormcloud overhead can’t be arsed. It’s no secret I can’t behave appropriately in times of intimacy-drought. Just pat it or rub it a little bit, mmm like that, and don’t stop or I might tear up the entire block with my superhuman libido.
Until The Last Light Goes Out I Was Still Here
Don’t talk to me about discipline – I just stood outside smoking with no pants on and I’m not even pissed. Out of sleepers, my insomnia is so rampant I’ve taken every soporific drug left in the house just to engorge the next four hours so it fills the hole. You want to look at me. You want to look at me. You look at me – I’m the last person you want to look at. Trust me, it doesn’t matter how far down you descend, when the say spiral they mean sheer drop, and yes, when there’s nowhere left to go you’ll find a recess, you’ll find the back alley, or the bad dream, or the waiting room, or the black out; it’s there; you won’t have to struggle far to reach it. There is no end. It goes on forever; I dream of a house and every room is empty. I look for you – in a thousand and sixty-nine nights I have not once sensed you there. Sometimes there is a broken chair, a falling curtain, but no body, no bloodstream. I get wet thinking about the needle you’re holding.
You make a scale model of my life. There’s the park bench, and the graveyard; the people looking on; the jumpers; you haven’t made me yet; you’re worried I’ll look different, there’s more I can lose; the pain is unquantifiable – it doesn’t quite work as a 3D art-piece, for all your efforts – you can’t fashion clay into a realistic ghost. You can’t bear to touch the parts of me you’d have to fix.
When you go, turn out the light for the last time.
I’ll have to feel my way around the walls to find the switch. And I told her when the switch goes on I can write it – but you know there is no switch. I say a lot of things for money and sex; The pain is not palatable, I know; maybe if we re-model the book as a script and draft in Michael Fassbender. Someone attractive in place of me; minus the scars – the scars could sell, but then again, your readers think they want to see them, but they crave the smooth skin those other writers wear for bed. So turn out the light; if I’m crying, just pretend you have somewhere to be; yeah I know you’re lying. Yeah I always know you are. Don’t worry about it – who would want to lie next to me? No one sleeps next to the ravine, do they? Or do they? Oh, the junkies, yeah. Oh, and the molested. Oh, and the emotionally replete; and no, these hundred beds I’ve died in this year didn’t like me either; I left them so clean; it was almost as if I didn’t exist.
Melissa Lee-Houghton is an English poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her 2016 poetry collection, Sunshine, won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and Costa Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book EXPOSURE/IDEAL PALACE is out now with Pariah Press.
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
