Announcing Half Mystic’s Nominees for the 2026 Pushcart Prize

Our Pushcart Prize selections are landmarks & lighthouses; they are wryly tragic & agonisingly gentle; they live with one foot in the ancestral & one in the visionary.

From the Editor: Willows Wake and Walk Away

As it leads you through a world where healing moves with the patience of river water, may Willows Wake & Walk Away offer you a place to rest, to reckon, & to rise once more.

“Once the need to conquer language fades, the poem has done its work.” (An Interview With Haley Wooning)

There’s a certain shame in confessing we are missing something—or missing within something.

“What happens after we survive the unthinkable?” (Haley Wooning on Willows Wake and Walk Away)

The knights keep watch as I try once again to name what can’t be named, to tell the story that keeps surviving me.

Literature, Music, Personal EssayGuestNovember 4, 2025Haley Wooning

Pulling the Sun Down: A Selection of Our Favourite Hybrid Magazines

Genre had to be invented, and it’s high time we start building artistic legacies beyond its walls.

Literature, Music, SelectionsLee AndersonSeptember 11, 2025

From the Editor: The Sevdah Issue

The Sevdah issue shines best in its sideways revelations, exposing what we’ve always wanted in the shape of its absence.

“We are so filled with feeling, even the gods must relent.” (Angela Sucich on Sevdah)

Psyche’s desperate desire for Cupid evokes sevdah, the human condition humming like a sad organ across a mythopoetic soundscape.

Literature, History, MusicGuestJuly 7, 2025Zanin Berbić, Damir Imamovic, Lucius Apuleius, Hippocrates, Ovid, Homer

“Why do we want or need to have our hearts wrenched again and again?” (Kathleen A. Wakefield on Sevdah)

The work of poetry is a perishing, hauntingly apprehended in the songs of sevdah.

Music, Literature, Personal EssayGuestJune 26, 2025Kathleen A. Wakefield, Ennis Cehic

“Memory and music are as inseparable as they are elusive.” (Natalie Marino on Sevdah)

To be young is fleeting. Love and life pass like the ungraspable wind, never to return again.

Music, Literature, Selections, Personal Essay, HistoryGuestJune 18, 2025Hippocrates, John Keats, James Joyce, Lucille Clifton

Announcing Half Mystic’s Nominees for the 2025 Pushcart Prize

Each of these pieces pulls us into sharp-eyed focus, reminds us why we’re here & who we’re becoming. Best of luck to our nominees. Here’s to possibility.