Shredded Maps ///

Contradiction and Community: A Talk with Dan Magers

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:14:52 +0900

Contradiction and Community: A Talk with Dan Magers:

The poetic work of Dan Magers is challenging and engaging, beautiful and mysterious. A few weeks ago I wrote a short piece about one of Magers’ poems and, more recently, had the chance to speak wit…

Blood Mask: On Room 237 or, Bonny Billy vs. Wendy Carlos

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:20:52 +0900

This is our mother-brain: a synth, raga, and a donkey. It shed hair, hard pressed by the question that doppelgangers are hawks carving chairs to disappear. And this beard is how I growl, see nothing but “impossible windows” in the goat-light of a film clip.

Here is the hotel where we strip rooms, luggage-stuffed organs, gutted screeches and a wave. This is not a lunar mission. These are not notes about shapeshifting. This is about wolves, eagles, and the subtext of a frozen frame.

We are a hedge maze: a duck is Jack, a boy’s sweater, beastman, finality, cacophonic pastness, gold rushes like “all the best people.” I’ve left you a key.

Unmask me in blood, mother-brain. Flood the shaft with royalty. Men in robes clink glasses when music blues the light. Unravel. This carpet is a diamond pattern of brothers, a family escaping these “pictures in a book.” All is not yet.

Not real. I’ll bring that ball and gown to the hospital as an alternate ending. It’s fit to shine. Show me the prince who looks like a Minotaur for this tale, our lost soundtrack of revelation, is the final interpretation on how to maunder.

Keep to a whisper. The dead do not whisper, they sing master

JAMIE GREFE, RE JOHANNES GÖRANSSON’S HAUTE SURVEILLANCE

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 21:55:32 +0900

JAMIE GREFE, RE JOHANNES GÖRANSSON’S HAUTE SURVEILLANCE:

Tarpaulin Sky gave me a beautiful page feature for the Meat Screams piece I did in regards to Goransson’s HAUTE SURVEILLANCE. Please click this post’s title for said page. Thank you!

Goblins: an Essay

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:44:00 +0900

I am at the house—again—to ignore a bag of bread, shell casings; guests stare, gnaw the perimeter like trees that get tangled in your hair when I bring you cake. You are hungry, tossing potato sacks down stairs. Let us sit at the table and wonder, we can conjure how to stop time. Rum raisin is not my prayer. You would know this if you didn’t fall asleep on street corners or use your belt and stave hunger, stay the father. I once saw my grandfather come out of the mirror. We built molotov cocktails in the bedroom and set priests on fire—the driveway is where goblins burn. Humans burn. Priests burn. We know how young men run through forests and drink milk, become branches or paste for maidens to eat. We hobble around the camper. I’ve brought popcorn and corn cobs for us to suck until we explode in gorilla suits with pink star-trails and organ flare. It’s not enough—melt. It’s not enough—save my mother from eating an apple. I’ve taken showers in green, hid under covers and shoo away teen boys who feign love for girls who take trips in vans to Nilbog. My grandfather is an angel. Goblins don’t exist. Repeat. This is not your kingdom of shadows. This is Provost in hell. We are a modern family: the van, sunlight, clover leaves and pianos lure mouths open—this is about not eating food. And if we speak, we shut our eyes to hear. And if we scream hard enough, our family just might sprout magic windows and stones of love. Press your hand against the stone. Press your hand against my heart of ham. Feel blood run. I’m made of sap, leaking son.

Pushing words: My lyric essay Tarantino Poetics: On Danny Brown...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:13:55 +0900

Pushing words: My lyric essay Tarantino Poetics: On Danny Brown is up at The Eyeslit-Crypt.

I wrote a short piece about creative nonfiction writer Brian...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:35:01 +0900

I wrote a short piece about creative nonfiction writer Brian Oliu’s book, LEVEL END at The Eyeslit-Crypt.

This is truly a beautiful book and highly recommended.

enter the moan of a rain-stroll: dew, sap, a voice like water,...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:47:01 +0900

enter the moan of a rain-stroll: dew, sap, a voice like water, unbreathing

"A dead man’s face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from..."

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:35:49 +0900

“A dead man’s face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists.”

- Yukio Mishima (via quotecatalog)

Meat Screams: An Attempt at Johannes Gorannson's Haute Surveillance

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:37:00 +0900

Meat Screams: An Attempt at Johannes Gorannson's Haute Surveillance:

My thoughts on Johannes Gorannson’s HAUTE SURVEILLANCE: live at Eyeslit-Crypt.

Reblogged at Montevidayo

THINGS: AN ESSAY (via Eyeslit-Crypt)

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:09:42 +0900

A new essay(istic) piece influenced by John Carpenter’s THE THING is up at my other home, The Eyeslit-Crypt. Read on, readers: THINGS: AN ESSAY

The Maze

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:09:15 +0900

It wasn’t that I was a writer and you a wife or a good place for our son to play. It was none of this. I don’t speak of dark kitchens at night when you are asleep and I am at the edge of the window looking at windows upon windows—how hot night becomes when soaked in drinks from a locked cupboard or freezer. I should have spoken of axes and typewriters. Typing is not just the clack of the keys or the insertion of paper into the machine, it is a ghost of hate that I will turn novel. I will complete this ghost even if it means I should reach a baseball bat or you walking up the stairs backwards, you dragging me to the freezer, but I’ve slashed all engines, dismantled the transmission and stolen the family key. I have the key. Here is where love lives unchangeable in the glow of soft light. It’s 1920 and I’m wearing a tux. You will notice my tux, because there was a photograph taken of so many people and you were not among them. We were not yet married. You have never stood in the kitchen at night or used an ax to chop down a door. There is more light where you are. The chef comes. I am redder after dark. But I’ve learned. I’ve learned how to follow your little steps around corners. You move quicker than the father. It’s my burden to be a father. I will make things right. Fathers make things right. It snowed on my birthday. My fingers can no longer type like the way snow falls on a maze at night. And it is night when we step into the maze. It is all I can do to give you something to remember me by—in the kitchen, the bright kitchen where you eat ice cream and drive trucks into hotel rooms. There is a room in the maze and I have the key. I’ve seen they way the other women smile. I have seen the father of the girls and I have to keep walking this maze so someday you’ll know what it means to be a father. I won’t carry you far. I won’t carry you at all.

kingofbeers: Will Oldam & Dawn McCarthy A short piece I...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:48:11 +0900

kingofbeers:

Will Oldam & Dawn McCarthy

A short piece I wrote for my blog, The Eyeslit-Crypt, was published on The Faun Fables site about the wonderful album, Wai Notes. I’m slow to discover these things and grateful for their use of the text. Here is the link: Wai Notes.

THE CABIN OF YOUR LACE SLASHER

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:03:53 +0900

We enter the cabin—it’s often a cabin, a house of wood: lights dim, click off. This is how it begins. Girls play guns in the woods, stack stick-piles by the creek and summon fire in Shinto dirt. They stick fingers in the dirt—never like this, not a blood soaked ritual by the grave. It ends up like this. Shane is the first to go: lopped off legs, eyes gouged, hair torn, mouth zeroed. There are no football players in our house on this night of red—not anymore. First names are not written, they are jack ‘o lanterned and lit. Do not use a hacksaw or a meat grinder or an ax. We know this. We know how to throw rocks in empty windows as if hitting a ghost-girl or a rivered spirit will release the darkness of being a teen. Shane is a teen, so is Eva, Linda, John, and Bill—dead, dead, dead. They are not fashion models. This is not Milano. Cut. Arms pile in the fireplace of the cabin: a fisherman’s net, a brick, a saw blade, rope. This drip is the sound of teen snapshots on Tumblr. Leave. Suck drugs from the soaking lungs of bones in the closet. Burn the oven. Torch the cabin. A step does not make a sound. The rocks we throw in the windows of the cabin in the woods, when we hold them in our teen hands, they are soundless oracles. They never make a sound and I would like to think of that ghost-girl in the dark by the window. She is still there and knows this night is a teen slasher, a way to ruin parties: the sex, the drugs, the blood, the dirt. Turn off the lights.

"I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, ‘Is this painting fictional or..."

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:11:00 +0900

“I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, ‘Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?’ It’s just a painting.”

- Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia (coming 3/13 from Two Dollar Radio)

nonamesareleft: (by M AI A) i’ll be a broken window for...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 06:56:55 +0900

nonamesareleft:

(by M AI A)

i’ll be a broken window for you

Non-Plot: Brad Dourif as alien, the ice blue gaze in front of a...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:09:00 +0900

Non-Plot: Brad Dourif as alien, the ice blue gaze in front of a stream of windmills in California spinning air to the sea. We are the Wild Blue Yonder, a botched mission to the scrap heap. Extraterrestrials learn how to fail on planet america. Welcome to Shredded Maps, where Brad Dourif speaks monologues to inner ears so we can hear better—the way the stars talk, baby.

TROPE MOUTH TWEET

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:53:27 +0900

trope: view from the eye-slats of latex, camera still w/breath, sharp on moving body as body moves from one side of the room to another.
— Jamie Grefe (@ShreddedMaps) March 15, 2013

night: remove hand from tomb vortex. it’s a whirl-spell, a cracked shell of light. when you reach the wet teeth, you will know oblivion.
— Jamie Grefe (@ShreddedMaps) March 15, 2013

Charred tips spattered pink. We scrub apple-mush in the cold. Your tendrils in my basin. You, reminder of dirt, cleanse me dry. #baconcue
— Jamie Grefe (@ShreddedMaps) February 27, 2013

i’m too many ways to look behind, but you are walking...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 11:12:33 +0900

i’m too many ways to look behind, but you are walking away—walking or pondering in a place of bird flutters, a purse and how fingers touch lips and cheek to glint hidden passages, caverns where sun warms a colorless body to glow. it was yohji yamamoto who spoke of how he would watch women walk and follow behind like a slasher or a lover in order to capture the body’s tendency to expand beauty (backwards) or constrict under certain fashion modes: calf, hip, neck. the gaze: he devoted himself to the way fabric drapes, but fabric doesn’t drape over your hair, it holds to your back, holds you to yourself. the ancient japanese spoke of the back of the neck as being the pinnacle of a woman’s beauty—the hot spot. garments were sewn open (left exposed) to highlight, to shadow, that tube of skin so when you walk past or walk away from me as you do, instead of having to confront you face to blinding face in that place where your fingers touch lips, there doesn’t have to be any language between us—no ways for us to part.

THE MASK OF SATAN: A LIST TO REMEMBER YOU BY

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:35:14 +0900

1. loop the sound of spiking the coffin lid
2. your black dress and european strings
3. an old tavern where you secrete time
4. priests pursue you under soft light
5. a doorway to the cavern of hate
6. sink asa in milan and i opened to:
7. godflesh stills of you at the stake
8. selfless eyes, barbara in black gown
9. run barefoot to the chamber, boil it
10. you’ll nail faces with mallet and hood
11. i hide your shell in the basement, but
12. red marks on your breasts are not stains
13. you don’t stain, it’s a smear of light
14. here is how i immortalize your visage
15. they’ve come here to burn you alive
16. like night of satan, or how the dead stalk
17. these caverns are not made of wood
18. heart caverns are made of skin—of you
19. like telepathy as transmission
20. you will reach the end and live on, dead
21. this is how i view lack of love, pretty star

eveofwitches: The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh enter the factory...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 23:02:31 +0900

eveofwitches:

The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh

enter the factory duct. here time constricts and
you shudder, cut rungs to nail shut the dome,
drain the swimming pool: limbs, glass hearts,
cement, bits of silk for the sequel. tip toe the
corridor for black gloves or a vapor that (always)
follows your sweat steps. quiet. finger a drain
pipe, trace oil smears to paint holes. walls sing blood,
hollow the valves: strips of lard, crust, honey piles.
but how can you turn when the door is a figure,
mask of blank eyes, void king of the ocean, your
anti-muse slasher in this night-tremble: bone sounds
like the fizz pop of a record. you’ll be the needle click.
he has words, too. they’re spilled maps, each one
is a continent where you’ll feed trash, spread on the
tiles, spread wide for the strobe lights of a new birth.