Half Mystic Radio, Season II, Episode V: The War That Has Everything

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 V: The War That Has Everything is out now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts, or right here at Half Mystic:

Episode V features Jehanne Dubrow’s poems “What Do You Give the War That Has Everything” (previously published in New England Review) & “Hail and Farewell” (previously published in The Cincinnati Review), & John the Rabbit’s song “At Night, At Home, At Last”.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of seven poetry collections, including most recently American Samizdat, and a book of creative nonfiction. Her eighth collection of poems, Simple Machines, won the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award and will be published by the University of Evansville Press in 2020. And her ninth book of poems, Wild Kingdom, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, and The Southern Review. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

John the Rabbit is the nom du guerre of poet, programmer and musician John Paul Davis. His first book, Crown Prince Of Rabbits, was published in 2017 by Great Weather For Media. His poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals. He is one-half of the indie pop duo Love In the Ruins. He lives with his wife, actress Mahira Kakkar, in New York City.

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 V right here. Thank you for listening, dear songbirds. Half Mystic loves you.

What Do You Give the War That Has Everything

The first year, we were told, is always
            the most difficult, a neutral zone
                        of afternoons and nights. Dear war,

we said, we are sending ourselves
            folded inside gilded envelopes—
                        we have stamped your name in wax.

By the second year, we’d learned
            to rip the bedsheets into strips
                        for bandages. This is the gift of cotton,

we said, that it soaks whatever seeps.
            Soon there was leather. Soon there was
                        linen, the wood we burned

when supplies were cut to the front.
            And later, there was iron melted
                        red and molded into spears,

the fruit-shape of grenades.
            In the seventh year, we gave
                        the war a heavy blanket made of wool.

Never mind, we said, the smell
            of other bodies in the folds.
                        We forgot the year of bronze.

Year nine, we offered up
            the decorative, a piece of pottery
                        painted with a chariot, a dead king

dragging through the dirt. 
            The war broke our present into shards.
                        After that, were years of tin and steel,

the tear of silk like a flag
            the horses trample on, then lace
                        as with the tender bodice of a girl. 

In the fourteenth year, there was ivory,
            because why not pull down
                        the giants of the world. And next 

a crystal cup for drinking victory,
            a porcelain plate to serve
                        a traitor’s head. In year twenty-five,

we engraved the war on silver.
            This is costing us too much,
                        we said. We barely counted then,

the years of pearl and coral,
            the ruby like a puncture wound,
                        the poison blue of sapphire set in gold.

The war took anything we had to give.
            Decades on, we gave emeralds for
                        the green of some forgotten field.

We gave the war a diamond,
            to honor its cleave and glittering,
                        its dreadful way of capturing the light.

Hail and Farewell

atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē. —Catullus  

When it’s over, he wants to leave
            without glasses raised together

at his going, no last salute or sir.
            I admit to gratitude.

I’ve never stood at ease in the uniform
            stillness of those wives,

dependents as they’re known,
            the watered silk of their voices

at a ball, or the brides who bend
            beneath an arch of sabers.

Although I understand the day
            must be lowered ceremoniously,

received into our hands. I understand
            we fold these endings

with neat and pointed corners.
            Some parties welcome

new arrivals to command.
            Some parties are for parting—

they take their names from poems
            of the dead. I’m glad he takes

nothing with him when it’s over,
            not the flowers, not the picture

of a little ship, how it floats forever
            in the matte-black frame of war.