Animals: “Worm” by Jayant Kashyap and Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith

worm


i.

this quiet incessant crawling
between things / sediments

like cold muddied
segmented fingers

being alive for so long without the sun
hugging only the earth forever

ii.

you know this divine hell of absent
animals / this graveyard / haven

of falling things /

this soft breathing
paradise

iii.

you: married to each other’s slime
married in the midst of silt

you: looking out for birds / finding

for each other
shadows / leaves /

soft breathable spaces
between rocks

iv.

you know that the truest form of love

is the unworldly / is the under-
world

where you make

and make
something with each other

v.

you know the roots
spindly like frayed rope /

long spider’s legs

that if you foraged too far you’d

climb into Hades’s hair

Artist Statement

The poem that is ‘worm’ began sometime in July 2023 with one of us at home (Jayant, in India) and the other (Lauren) in a café in Indonesia. Each of us was in a chair with a notebook and a laptop. The basic idea was to work on a topic that meant something to both of us, and we ended up working on more than one central theme—environment, mythology and love, to say the least. It didn’t come to us directly, of course, but we juggled several words, say “sediment”, “underworld”, “un-world-ly”. It was mostly a silent call—unless one of us was reading their lines to the other. First, each of us wrote a few lines without checking with the other, and then we read those out loud, which helped us understand what might need reorganising and what rewording, even if only slightly. Some words were added to or removed from some lines, and during further drafting, we ended up borrowing a bit from Joseph Fink’s novel ‘Alice Isn’t Dead’: “I think love is cooking together. I think it’s making something with each other.” Soon, redrafting, which took a little while, and it made the poem ready for publication.

About Jayant Kashyap

Jayant Kashyap, the author of the pamphlets Unaccomplished Cities and Survival, will publish his New Poets Prize-winning third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, with Smith | Doorstop in 2025. He is the author of a zine, Water (Skear Zines, 2021), and his poems have appeared in POETRY, Magma, Arc, Acumen and Poetry Wales.

About Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith

Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith is the author of Look How Alive (Write Bloody UK, 2022) and the pamphlet Ugly Bird, which won the 2020 New Poets Prize.