Half Mystic Radio, Season II, Episode IV: Today, Aria; Tomorrow, Dirge
Content warning for Episode IV of Half Mystic Radio: this episode contains a homophobic slur.
Half Mystic Radio is back with Season II: featuring eight brand-new writers & musicians, & guest hosted by 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 Season II as it continues (along with all eight episodes of Season I, hosted by myself!), on your favourite podcast platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Soundcloud, Stitcher, & Amazon Music. Or, listen directly on our website.
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Season II, Episode IV: Today, Aria; Tomorrow, Dirge is out now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts, or right here at Half Mystic:
Episode IV features Sara Hovda’s poems “Faggot Once Again Considers Their Body”, “My Own Gender”, & “One Year on Hormones”, & Cronkite Satellite’s song “Be Alone”.
Sara Hovda was born and raised in rural Minnesota. She received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Winona State University and her MA in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Some of her research interests include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, queer poetics, and queer and feminist theory. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere.
Cronkite Satellite is a one man band with a full band sound. He’s an international live looping musician as well as a multi-instrumentalist, producer, sound engineer, filmmaker, poet, graphic designer and educator. He currently has seven independently produced albums available, and is steadily performing gigs all around the planet. Previous tours include: America, China, Mexico, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Turkey, Qatar, Cambodia, Belgium, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore and India.
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 IV right here. Thank you for listening, dear songbirds. Half Mystic loves you.
Faggot Once Again Considers Their Body
It’s hard to think of myself
as human anymore. Could I snap
off a rib, drop it in a jar,
let it grow into my new body?
Mornings I stretch for three hours
or else my shoulders constrict
like a broken promise pinches
the gut when I see again
this body
that trusts me,
though I want to squeeze it
thin into a smaller corset.
I think of pills
when I stretch, and a sundress. I learn
the conventions of types of songs:
today, aria; tomorrow, dirge: think how shape
determines resonance, this male flesh
nearly orc with its slouch and lurch,
how octave and timbre
determines the gender of a voice.
If I capo
my vocal cords with falsetto, then
could I be human? As in please,
let me have this. I have this
red stone under my breast,
all these knots
tense in my neck. Even if I keep
this body. Even if I don’t.
My Own Gender
I don’t know what
it is so many men women
tell me what they feel
they know it is I don’t
know but I do know
what it looks like
ice flowers silver
erupt between my ribs
One Year on Hormones
the boy I wasn’t is dead
he’s dead he never was
even an ember never once like a spark his name
is dead his too-broad shoulders
his calves thighs tight as a buck’s
his dick that would never stay hard
tendril recoiling into its dark underbrush
all his love the crisp petals
nerves like computer circuits he hid
from lovers from love he hid
in his head in books poems anywhere
but people he died in the arms
of various women
in my arms again again again again
no crying no soft pulse like a single distant star
I forgive him. I forgive him.
I’m trying to forgive him. Let him go.