"It's how August would feel if it could feel anything." (Yves Olade on Grazioso)

Yves Olade is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s fourth issue, grazioso. He is a history student who lives in the south of England. He’s been featured in Kingdoms in the Wild and published in the Rising Phoenix Review, Bombus Press, the Horn & Ivory zine and L'Ephemere Review. He's also self-published a micro-chapbook called Bloodsport. An avid documentary fan, he loves mobile games, evenings, and flowers he can’t name. More of his poetry can be found at yvesolade.tumblr.com or on twitter @yvesolade.

/

We asked three of our Issue IV contributors to share with us their personal definitions of “grazioso”: how it is formed, where it has been, what it could be. Here is Yves Olade's vision of the dream-bright waltz – the soft-stained song – the place where sunlight settles & nothing really hurts…

When so much of your life is characterised by hurt, thinking of what doesn’t hurt can be another type of pain. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, ochre yellow and golden. Bright like pulling a splinter, or stretching your back, or crying through a tragic piece of cinema—a feeling like your body settling back into itself. Catharsis. A feeling like twilight, a fever-bright dusk, standing by the rosé in the wine aisle and falling apart for reasons you can’t name. How all these things are so necessary & so gentle, and you feel the earth, wide and sedate beneath your feet.

It’s amber and marigold and honey. It’s how August would feel if it could feel anything.

I think of September as crimson red and burning, and the fall between the seasons as honey lowered into steeped tea. Something gentle holding just below the surface. The memory of a sweet taste in the back of your throat. Stepping out of your way to feel the crunch of falling leaves. Art on the walls. Stacks of used paperback books. A thousand kind and tender pleasures. Yet, it’s also a bolt of fear. The last slide of a rising elevator. Feeling featherlight and reckless as you realise that you’ve fallen in love. Grazioso is the apricot and the pomegranate both. Mercy all the more welcome after a touch of pain.

I’ve heard songs that dance in strands of amber and merlot, songs that a soul might sing, if it sang. Writing “Another Name for Distance”, I pulled on the threads of a thousand glowing moments—moments bright enough to be blinding, to be hazy as summer dreams, restless and salt-stained like a fever. Some nights I dream about dancing to a song that almost follows me out of sleep. Some nights I don’t dream at all. What I mean is, that there’s a harmony to the world that sometimes slips through your fingers. The scent of thunder. The feel of warm, warm rain. I could have danced all evening, played all night. I could have moved to rhythm of the wind through trees like a lover might.

I spoke about lethargy, I meant forgetting. I meant everything orange and glowing and gold. I meant falling and falling and falling. I meant a gentle daze. A yellow blur. Euphoria in the song of a sunset in summer, in the smooth glide of a blade of grass in your hand that reminds you of the softness of someone’s palm. I meant melody & strings, rhapsody & joy. Like wall barley, crumbling naked at a touch. An open sky.

Grazioso feels something like that.

/

Yves Olade's poem “Another Name for Distance”, along with twenty other pieces by contributors and three columns by the Half Mysticteam, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IV:GRAZIOSO, a volume of work full of the rare kind of light that never drowned anything, the kind of light that knows only song.It is available for preorder now.