From the Editor: The Elegy Issue

There are moments music falls short. When those of us who didn’t die stand at the grave of beauty, it’s easy to fall prey to the unanswerable, to regret so loudly that our questions wring us out.

In the process of curating Half Mystic Journal’s Issue X: Elegy, I’ve been struck over & over by how many pieces examine what it means to have & to be a mother. If grief is nothing else, I must believe it is a mother: gifting us our names, teaching us with every step & every breath how to cherish what’s left. We’ve let go of so much over the past nine issues, over every life lived so far. In Issue X, when our grief grows teeth, we invite it to share a meal with us instead of devouring us. Instead of asking it to return what we’ve lost, we ask what it wants in return for stopping by. We name it window & mirror at once, allow it to get on its knees & pray alongside us, serve as our mouthpiece to the thing it stole.

If we are all the dead conversing with the dead, I like to think the language we use to bridge the space between us is called music. I like to think when we reach out to one another, bodiless, formless, we rewrite touch as a kind of sound. Maybe there is nothing but darkness after we leave. & yet, through all that ending, I like to think we find entrances. I like to think we find each other.

The night is long, & this elegy can’t fill every hole that remains. Even still, in the midst of our mourning, we wake & chase the holy. There is no place here that death doesn’t circle, no vacuum that silence didn’t fill long ago. Issue X is a prayer against forgetting, a promise to bear witness even to those moments where music falls short. & when the time comes to let go of what it can’t live without, the elegy issue knows what it means to wake into memory. It knows that in a world touched by song, there exists no such thing as extinction.

Issue X showcases the theme of elegy: the last dropped petal—the mirror in mourning—the light still on for what was once beautiful. It features the voices of Philip Schaefer, Gavin Yuan Gao, Brittany Adames, Meg Reynolds, Anthony Thomas Lombardi, DeeSoul Carson, Katrinka Moore, Emily Zogbi, Paola Bennet, Geoff Anderson, Esther Kim, Emma Chan, Esther Sun, Tori Grant Wellhouse, Taylor Gianfrancisco, myself, Abby E. Murray, Laura Mei Roghaar, & Maria Chiara Piglione. It is out now.

Order your copy today. We’re so honoured to share it with you. xx