The Vesper Letters (A Selection)

Throughout our reading period for Opus II, Issue III: Vesper, Half Mystic received hundreds of love letters with your submissions: about chiaroscuro & cello strings, Tom Waits & whiskey rituals, your most indefensible ice cream flavours. Like all the best songs, we can’t get them out of our heads. Here is a smattering of our favourite notes accompanying submissions to the vesper issue. Thank you, songbirds, for finding us again & again through the dark.

Opus II, Issue III of Half Mystic Journal is a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, & prose celebrating an event horizon, a bell tolling in a vacuum, a cicada’s song harsh and generous enough to wear twilight to bone. The vesper issue does not arrive so much as descend: unhurried as smog or sleep paralysis, inevitable as the ouroboros’ endless coil. A shattered mirror multiplies the face of darkness, silence textured & breathing, the body made uncertain of its edges. You’ve been here before, in the dream that returns you always to the same locked room. The door opens only inward. You’ve been knocking all night. Come inside.

I want to begin with the music, how it has always been there. First as a young skater choreographing her own routines. Then as a young poet driven toward sense by sound. Now as a woman years into making things with words.

I was drawn to Half Mystic for its devotion to the surreal, the sonic, and the deeply felt—work that lingers in that threshold where language begins to blur into music. The theme of Vesper immediately resonated with me, particularly the idea of darkness not as absence, but as a place of transformation.

I never write a poem unless it is a song, and I never write a song unless it is a poem.

Music was my gateway drug to the literary arts. As a guitar player and vocalist in several metal/grindcore bands in my late teens, I was introduced to the works of William Burroughs and Denis Cooper by a bandmate, which served to explode the notion I’d had of literature as stuffy and, frankly, un-cool.

The poems I’m submitting for Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue III: Vesper explore the chiaroscuro between devotion and desecration, reverence and ruin—that fragile hour when the veil between the sacred and the profane begins to thin.

I do not earn anywhere near enough to justify owning a turntable and records, but I do own them, because what I listen to late at night matters more to my well being than avoiding too much instant noodle.

Recently I’ve listened to a lot of The Red Clay Strays, as well as JID’s new project God Does Like Ugly. My favorite ice cream flavor is cookie dough, and the local bookshop I adore is One Grand Books in Narrowsburg, NY.

It’s very cold out, and my house has become a ship that I cannot leave at the risk of drowning in snow. Birds come right up to my office window just to taunt me, to demonstrate that they are too small and light to sink into the snow, and besides, they can always fly away if they really want to.

I found Half Mystic by search, and by the word “mystic,” pulsing in poetry, in my veins, and in my vision.

Music, for me, is both pulse and compass. As a child, I took piano lessons not to become a virtuoso, but to strengthen the hands and fingers my disability left weak—so I could open jars, fasten buttons, strive towards normalcy. These poems are also written with music in mind—the breath before the leap, the silence between beats, the crescendo of a moment fully felt.

My favorite ice cream flavor is the honey sopapilla ice cream from H-E-B here in Texas, because fried dough and honey are made of magic.

I didn’t realize until reviewing the theme for this issue that each of these poems has a distinct thread of darkness, awakening, and the consciousness grappling with terrible beauty.

I found Half Mystic through a local bookstore in Nashville, when I lived there, but now my favorite local shop has no particular name except for a big sign reading “BOOKS.” It’s wedged between a rodeo-themed pediatric dentist and a Target, across Academy Blvd. from the Big Lots that’s now a Spirit Halloween and the Wendy’s with the lowest wait times in town. They also sell intricate, wood-carved clocks by a local artist, and it’s there that I got my dad his last Father’s Day present: a clock, shaped like the Death Star, that includes a representation of Luke and Vader’s final fight so detailed that you can nearly hear John Williams’ epic score whenever you check the time.

I have a sugar allergy, but during some moon cycles, I smash Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream. It’s worth the skin penalty.

Black cherry chip is by far the best ice cream in existence, and Lost City Books in Washington, D.C. organizes a killer book club.

I’ve played the violin since I was six and made the switch to viola in my twenties (for all the laughable and stereotypical reasons). These days I play in the Neuss Sinfonia and write sad music that I play on the piano for my two cats, neither of whom is especially appreciative.

As to music, recently I’ve been listening, obsessively (the way I prefer) to Nick Drake’s song "River Man," and to the Estonian composer Arvo Part’s “Lamentate.” While the two pieces come from different worlds, they are united by feeling—a kind of free floating, rich and resonant melancholy.

I wrote my first poem over fifty years ago standing in a soft rain at the archery range I was in charge of at Camp Wichingen Boy Scout camp in Minnesota. Over decades now, images, rhymes, lyrics, connections and conundrums have grabbed me and compelled me to write. I am now winnowing through my harvested grains of wordplay, long siloed, that still seem to have life germ in them, and sharing the harvest.

My poems operate on the same wavelength I use music for. The anchor and the release valve. The stillness mid-panic, along with the stomp underneath it.

If you’re ever in Ann Arbor, MI, check out Literati Bookstore and Blank Slate Creamery, where you’ll find a very good strawberry balsamic.

I forever worship at the altar of At the Drive-In. I don’t have a playlist ready to go, but In // Casino // Out is my favorite record.

For me, music is a sculptural force. It lingers even after it fades, shaping space and collapsing time, much like the body enduring under weight or within boundaries. My art echoes this: repetitions, loops, and cycles that never quite resolve, creating visual scores out of tension and stillness.

These pieces move through thresholds of light and absence, where mirrors tremble and memory becomes a kind of music.

Two records, back to back: Siren by Roxy Music (1975)—the glide from “Love Is the Drug” into the darker cuts, Bryan Ferry’s croon over those stark, skeletal arrangements. And then the piano music of Erik Satie—the “Gymnopédies” and “Gnossiennes,” which are not sad exactly, but hollowed out in a way that feels truer than sadness. Satie called them “music to fill the silence.” Half Mystic Journal’s Vesper issue is the silence I want to fill.

Music to me means the air is etched with sonic baubles, trinkets, and mysterious soundings, enhancing the atmosphere to enrich life. Music is the edge of the frame in all pictures of places, stiffening the liminal to reinforce sound as place maker. Music, the poetry of sound, of dips and bobs of acoustic disturbances so pleasing to ear and resonant in the mind, flits as the ephemeral butterfly: to capture it denies its beauty of motion.

I, too, have a fondness for music. While I cannot play a note or carry a tune, my head, heart, and the small realm of the rest of me constantly channel all sorts of sound.

For me, music exists in the sounds of the years passing, the leaf falling from the branch, the answers with no question, the concerted music of bees’ wings, the silent calls between two bodies at rest but reaching out for the other.

In my submission you’ll find five poems that orbit around Vesper—an offering made to a desert horizon line, strings connecting our world of the living to the dead, doors opening to fertile darkness.

I love a good Tom Waits album, early or late, scruffy jazz or scratchy squawks. I like a track that shows its stitches, like you can see how it was made and how it’s coming apart as it’s ripping through the world. Free jazz has caught me lately because it’s indescribable and unrepeatable but with blood underneath it. That’s how I want my poetry to work: composed, but also falling out of the sky.

My go-to independent bookstore is Chapters on Parnell Street in Dublin, which lets anyone sit on folding chairs in the used books section for as long as they want without any pressure to buy anything.

Something to know about me is that I am still, what feels like hundreds of years later, enamored with the sound of the cello that I played as a child. Though I moved on to flute and piccolo afterward, they never captured me, haunted me as cello has. This Vesper call feels like it might play cello.

Samia’s music feels like a dream to me, and I’m listening to her song “Pool” as I write this note. It feels like an invitation from nightfall, or a portal into it.

These three poems explore the edges of chiaroscuro, the shiver of that blurred line between light and darkness, that I hear in three musical compositions.

Ice cream—okay, hear me out, but have you tried basil and blackberry? Because I was skeptical, but it is delicious. Local bookstore, well, I’m in Colorado Springs, so the most obvious is Poor Richard’s, but I’m actually a bigger fan of Westside Stories (which might seem sacrilegious to some here, but I said what I said).

My views on music are formed by Susanne Langer’s classic Philosophy in a New Key. Music “articulates forms which language cannot set forth” (233), and allows us to know things experientially without naming them linguistically—to access a living truth without trapping it in the amber of discursive speech. It is, I think, the same state that lyric poetry aspires to, though as the medium of poetry is language, this is necessarily a more fraught and tortured process—which is, of course, the source of much of the fascination of poetry, which pursues music without reaching it, and fails, and tries again, endlessly and with delight.

While singing with a jazz trio for a biweekly supper club gig during graduate school, I was introduced to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas, and it became clear that I should devote my life to poetry, wanting to write poems that would sing themselves off the page.

I also appreciate that you identified two of the most important favorites one can have; mine are mint chocolate chip and Bindlestiff Books in West Philly.

I’m an unlikely person to be involved with country music, since I come from a family of tone-deaf Jewish NYC academics. Nevertheless, since I was around nine years old and first heard Tanya Tucker and Waylon and Willie and Loretta and Dolly and Tom T. Hall on a radio station that used to exist in the New York/New Jersey area, I have been fascinated by country music. I started writing songs as a kid, and, when my first marriage cracked up twenty years ago, I ran away from home and moved to Nashville—right around the time when I was too old to have a chance of making it, and right around the time when the music industry started to tank because people no longer paid for music. (I pride myself on my timing.)

I am currently bumping “To Those Who Fight” by NAUSYQA as I submit—highly recommend. Also, FKA Twigs has been heavy in rotation lately. Both Eusexua and Eusexua Afterglow are incredible.

And because you asked: my favorite ice cream flavor is butter pecan, and my favorite local bookstore is Park Road Books here in Charlotte.

These poems were born holding vigil. Then continue to unfold in the aftermath of the illness and passing of my previous life partner, who died when we were both too young.

I think a lot about the white space on the page and how language can be just as effective when it’s not there. Music to me feels similar, and I’ll try my best to explain: I listen to music religiously, but I never get a spiritual experience unless I’m on the outskirts of sound, on the other end of being able to make out the lyrics or pinpoint the genre. I think what I’m trying to say is that the further I am from the sound of music, the closer I feel to the people who are making it.

My favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry (ideally in a waffle cone), and my favorite local bookstore is Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, IL.

Last November, I got a record player and have been busy building my own collection of vintage records. My favorite record store in my city (Utrecht, Netherlands) is called Dig It!.

I wanted to share this story with Half Mystic for the Vesper issue because it feels particularly crepuscular, drowned in the mixture of waves and wavering strings.

For nineteen years, every December 29th has pulled me back to the alley where my closest friend’s body was found—my own stubborn, whiskey-and-Tom-Waits ritual of not letting her slip into the archives. This piece is about the first time I felt I could leave that alley, not by letting go of her, but by letting music hit hard enough to carry me somewhere new. One night at a rock show, a single song turned into a séance, an exorcism, and a reminder that I can stand in my grief without drowning in it.

I believe that grappling with the devastating vulnerability of trying (and usually failing) to understand each other might be our most essential, human resistance. It is folly, it will never be perfectly whole, but we must dance together, no matter the cost.

I’m not listening to music as I write this because it’s dusk, and the nightingales have begun to sing. This is one of my favorite songs.

As James Baldwin suggested in “Sonny’s Blues” (the story I assign first in every fiction writing class I teach), the tale of how we suffer and how we triumph is “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness,” and it’s music that makes that light flicker and dance as vibrantly as we can dare to light it.

I hope these skipping syllables will take you someplace worth remembering.

Responses have been edited for length & clarity.

Half Mystic Journal’s thirteenth issue, centred on the theme of vesper, is open for preorder now. Releasing on July 28, Opus II, Issue III troubles the gravity of waking, breathes best in the hour without honest name. It is a sound the throat produces only once, at the last lit edge of the world. We’d love to send it to your doorstep for summer nights ahead.