From the Editor: The Sforzando Issue

There are some things we don’t speak about. It’s easier that way, because when we open our mouths to say what needs to be said, often we find the words on the tips of our tongues are I’m scared. That’s not a story anyone wants to tell.

Yet now, as we face a world ravaged by torn sky & warning noise, I am learning that there is too a salvation in shattering the throne of the unsayable. If we can’t tell the story that starts with I’m scared, maybe instead we can tell a story about staggering & still staying on our feet, a story about snapping the boundary between loneliness & sound. Maybe we can tell a story where we strike song against absence & eat the sparks alive. 

In our five years of publishing this journal, Half Mystic has never yet put out an issue that so directly chases the mythology of fracturing, that so fully embodies the period at the end of a sentence that changes everything. At its truest heights, Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando is a wreckage & a reckoning—but it is also a rebirth. Because the only way to make sense of the horrors we’ve seen is by reaching out to each other. Because what we want most is not to escape but to know for sure that we were here in the first place.

Sforzando is an issue of the body & its expulsions, its disasters, its tectonic shifts. This issue understands better than anyone how abruptly & incandescently blood ends up in all the wrong places. It is not a crescendo but a car crash, perfect as death, sudden as becoming. It strikes to kill. Its pain is radiant & hazardous & true, a perfect C-note of warm venom like a bee sting. Nothing in this place has ever been abandoned. If we sound desperate, that’s only because we know what our hands can do.

You’re scared. That’s okay. So am I. We can stand here together & look the breakage straight in the eye. This is a lovesong made of livewire, a serenade to spillage, a hymn in open wounds. It’s okay if you’re scared. But whatever you do, don’t flinch.

Issue VIII showcases the theme of sforzando: the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering. It features the voices of Jessie Lynn McMains, Elizabeth Ruth Deyro, Alena Zeng, Peter Milne Greiner, Gale Acuff, Elijah Mann, myself, C.A Scheherazade, Cindy Xin, Rodney Wilder, Matt Mitchell, Leela Chantrelle, The Haunt, Jonah Howell, Sophie Zhu, Jam Pascual, Hana Widerman, Love In the Ruins, Yejin Suh, & Joan Pope. It is out now.

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