Introducing Presto

Ten issues. Ten dreams of quiet & noise. Ten volumes later, seven years older, & so much has changed, & nothing has at all, in the funny way time ravels & unravels at once. It’s been ten issues of Half Mystic Journal, & we’ve mourned & rejoiced, crescendoed & plateaued, listened & lingered & languished & lasted. We’ve championed the unsung & the unheard. We’ve dug deep into the wreck, & not the story of the wreck; the thing itself, & not the myth. This project has been an experiment in prayer & outrage: open palms & open psalms, meaning laughter as part of the bargain, meaning eyes up & homesick for tomorrow.

& now we find ourselves on the edge of what once was. We’re ready to stretch our wings, to try something new.

Welcome to our next adventure, dear songbirds, what we’re calling Opus II of Half Mystic Journal. In this new act, we’re remixing, reimagining, & rewriting our first ten themes, beginning with Opus II, Issue I: Presto.

For our eleventh issue, we’re considering the underside of the allegro theme that began Half Mystic Journal. Send us your best poetry, prose, & visual art about vanishing points, beat drops, bar hops, glow stick raves, impulsive haircuts, disco ball suncatchers, man-made magick, glitter in the shadows, blurred vision, sleight of hand, immaterialism, songs half-lucid & bewitched by the myth of movement. Presto is a musical direction indicating that an artist play a piece at a rapid tempo, & also an English adverb meaning “suddenly, as if by magic.” In Issue I of our second opus, show us what you’re running towards, or running from. Give us speed & surreality. Surprise us. Blur the borders. Make us look again. We ask that all submissions relate to the presto theme & in some way evoke music.

Opus II, Issue I: Presto comes out in July 2023. Submissions of poetry, prose, & visual art are hosted on Submittable, & are always free (with the option to send in a $5 donation to support Half Mystic’s work, or pay $15 for the editorial review option to receive detailed feedback on your submission from three members of our team).

For submission inspiration, the entirety of our first opus is available to purchase on the Half Mystic website. Our latest is Issue X, elegy, celebrating the last dropped petal—the mirror in mourning—the light still on for what was once beautiful. 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 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.

It’s hard to believe in something deeply enough to spend seven years with it. In Half Mystic’s first opus, we asked ourselves over & over what we believe. & over the course of ten issues, we finally found the answer: we believe in sacrifice & solitude, in dissonance & defiance, in wildflowers & wallflowers, in the mundane & the marvellous, in all things full of gods. We believe in listening to the ghosts. We believe in laughter so hard there’s no sound & in the still before the train comes. We believe in every verb. We believe in cataclysm. We believe in truth. & we believe in music. If nothing else, we believe in music.

To those who have been with Half Mystic since we opened our doors in 2015, thank you. It’s stunning to think that—hundreds of pages, pieces, copies, orders later—we’re still here, shining brighter than ever. We couldn’t do this without your support.

& if you found us today, welcome. We’re so happy you made it. Ready to make a little magick together?