Half Mystic Radio, Season II, Episode I: How Gold the Flecks of Gold
Half Mystic Radio is back! Welcome to Season II: featuring eight brand-new writers & musicians, & guest hosted by longtime friend of Half Mystic, poet & comedian Stephanie Dogfoot. Each episode interrogates, lingers with, & puts in conversation & context art by diverse artists in diverse mediums, expanding & redefining narratives of what poetry & music “should” be. This kind of art is what we came for: the wreck, & not the story of the wreck. The thing itself, & not the myth.
A reminder that you can stream all eight episodes of Season I, hosted by myself, on your favourite podcast platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Soundcloud, Stitcher, & Amazon Music. Or, listen to Season I directly on our website.
Excited for Season II of Half Mystic Radio? Spread the word with the hashtag #halfmysticspeaks, leave us a rating & review on your podcast platform of choice, or @ us directly on social media—@wearehalfmystic on all platforms! You showed overwhelming support for Season I of this project, & we can’t wait for you to hear what we’ve been working on in the interim.
Season II, Episode I: How Gold the Flecks of Gold is out now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts, or right here at Half Mystic:
The first episode of our new season features Logan February’s poems “A Monument”, “The Gemini Man”, & “Husband Is the Loveliest Word”, & Love in the Ruins’ song “Matt & Polly’s Suite”.
Logan February is a non-binary Nigerian poet and graduate student at Purdue University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. They and their work have been featured in The Guardian Life, Dazed, The Rumpus, Lambda Literary, Washington Square Review, Africa In Dialogue, and more. They are the author of In The Nude (Ouida Poetry, 2019 / PANK Books, 2021) and three chapbooks. Love in the Ruins is Dana Suchow and John Paul Davis. When they’re not making music, Dana is a speaker and educator for women’s empowerment; John is a poet and programmer.
This season of Half Mystic Radio is guest hosted by Stephanie Dogfoot & produced by me, editor-in-chief Topaz Winters. If you’d like to support Half Mystic financially so that we can keep this podcast & other projects free for you, do consider purchasing one of our books or journal issues.
If you so choose, you can read along to each poem in Episode I right here. Thank you for listening, dear songbirds. Half Mystic loves you.
A Monument
What if we built it and the center held?
And elsewhere the rage collected. And the people
made their little monuments of it. Symbols of law,
symbols of desire—Venetian blinds that hold fast
the boundaries we grin from behind. Symbols like lines
of white light which splintered our walls and ruined thought.
What was it, then, about that common color?
It made you so happy inside a general state of need.
Like Nelson, you dreamed a home built out of deep blue,
a rough and familiar lazuli interior. How humbling,
all our height underground. How gold the flecks of gold.
The Gemini Man
Did he come to you as a dream in the night or in your waking hours? —Euripides, Bakkhai
He was so tired, running from dawn's breaking.
He stood at the day's furthest edge, on a haunted cliff
Where the wind was brisk with desire, yet slow, unmoving.
Before him again, the shining world was tucked into a fog
Of alien harmattan. The future hidden from him. Would he fall
Into a dusty field of dogs, or a garden with green snakes
Tangled together like dancing vines—festival garlands—
Or a blue room of mad, patient heat? Would he stand
Before the door and knock for me on the other side?
He knew I waited, I stalked the sharp edges of his mind
And called with my voice like wings beating the hot night air.
He heard fruit bats flying around street lamps in blinded circles.
Everything hidden from them. He wanted to shut his eyes
But he knew the light had nowhere else to go.
Husband Is the Loveliest Word
In that terrible heat,
we made our feast. The oil
golden with spices, the skillet's
wicked, dissolving whisper
reminding us of every old burn.
Savor of warm flesh. Umami.
It was very good. From your fingers,
the salt was a blessing. I had to take
my shirt off. To take the paring
knife from your hand. I wished
we had Bordeaux. We were trapped
in a kind of silence. When the song
ended, it started to play again.