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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.
(via limeflavored)
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THE END OF THE BODY: A DISPOSABLE MICRO-ESSAY
the body or the tree around which it wraps or is enraptured as the way the body is entangled to the world. sink. or the pull. how your face as a point of non-entry, the point where i stop believing you could ever help me up out of the muck. i have fallen asleep in the yard again. i have had to breathe autumn in the yard again. and to think of the object of the body as a disappearance, something melded to earth like smoke, to dirt, to space and to notice the lack of you not being here, but a frozen you will never melt. you are all face, the only white in the overgrowth. here is the way to die. there are thorns, branches in the decay of the agony you express. keep it hidden. only in the backyard is there peace for this silence to bloom. is it sunday? is it not thursday, for in japanese, thursday is day of the tree, but you are not a tree, you are a human turned plant or vine or growth, something puzzling in the way eyes shut, but there are no eyes here to stare into, only black rims, blackened lips, the dark beyond and this is not shinto, this is not buddha, this is a movement. to ever grasp space in the light of the void is the perpetual downward thrust of the legs kicking. be object in the void like being born to a weed or a trap. not to be trapped is to become space or water and in this black frame, your body is only a shell, not a vine to be cut or a tree to grow over the house. there are no houses inside your body, only shells of who you thought you were, but slip wrong and get caught in the dirt: walk slow, step small, step invisible. space dirt is white, flecks of white float you down in a loop and it is the pattern of how you refuse to turn and face the light while ohno is the world itself, a way for the cosmos to enter from a straight position via the body. there are two bodies, but each body is a looping body until yes, yes, we fall cold in the heap of these frozen solitudes perceptive enough to understand the magnitude of what it means to bask in the oddity of the body-form. keep twisting you wandering shell, but you have given ears to the grass, have decided to wait for the worms to bring message of your monochromatic twirl. it is all ice here in the black and white void where there is only hair and caked-on make-up gazes for men who are women and women who are women. the void manifests in ways of which we have no way to combat, except to enter the gaze, enter the heart of the gaze as gaze eternal and cast this body up and out of itself to the trees, to the deep, to the black or the sunken loop that will spin forever. forever.
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High Resolutionmasahisa fukase
I lived in Japan for six years, and some part of me is still there. I remember the crows in Tokyo, the black dots of Ibaraki, crows so unafraid of you and so in love with glittering and black they might pluck out your eyes just to get close. “They are smart,” some would say. “They are thinking.” In Japan the power lines, electrical wiring systems, superconductors, grids—words I don’t know well—are the roadside temples of night driving like the green lights in the field from Tsukuba to Bando, Bando to Moriya. They built a rail system to Tokyo. Forty minutes of electricity. I’m not yet sure what this photograph by Fukase-san means to me, but I could be with those crows, be back there in that grain of speaking backwards Japanismo, eyeless with those crows. Yes, some part of me is still there, some still part.
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Battle Lion
Click to view Battle Lion: Jamie Grefe on GLOSSI.COM
This short magazine showcases six previously unpublished pieces and features original photographs from Michigan, Tokyo, and Hainan. The following pieces appear in this issue: “Sitting Fire,” “Fifth Folio: Production Notes,” “Knuckling Water,” “Apple Tongue,” “Battle Lion,” and “For Nick Cave.” I hope to make more of these Glossi’s in the future. Thank you for reading.
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Cutlery. Ecstasy. Vinegar. Broken China
I have a lyric essay in the new issue of Rufous City Review (Issue Seven). This essay is about the Vienna “aktionist” Rudolf Eb.er and the short time I spent with him in Osaka, Japan and the collaborative project that ensued.
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Gone, Risen, Stay Gone
My second poem for the poetry journal, Dead Snakes. There is a hint of joyousness in this piece and yet, a hopeful longing. The images and flow of the poem are personal, based on happenings in my own life, the ebb and flow of circumstance and Fortune, family and choices. That said, this one is from the heart. As always, thank you for reading my work.
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My Feigned Nights
A two hundred word flash piece edited by Dogzplot editor, Barry Graham. This short piece is actually more memoir than fiction. If you end up in a small town in Ibaraki prefecture by the name of “Bando,” seek out an establishment called “Pure Heart,” if it still exists. I hope it does. Somehow, I know it does.
Shredded Maps ///
Jamie Grefe: fiction, poetry, essays
