Half Mystic Radio, Season II, Episode II: A Future Where You Won't Leave

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 II: A Future Where You Won’t Leave is out now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts, or right here at Half Mystic:

Episode II features Ben Togut’s poems “Saudade: Autumn”, “Elegy”, & “Coercion Aubade”, & Bennett Bay’s song “Gone”.

Ben Togut is a queer poet and singer-songwriter from New York City. He has received national recognition in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, as well as an honorable mention from the Wesleyan University Hamilton Prize for Creativity. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Hobart, The Offing, DIALOGIST, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. He is an undergrad at Wesleyan University.

Bennett Bay is a musician based in Singapore whose sound is inspired by everyday occurrences, personal values and pastoral imageries. An acoustic guitar stands at the core of his music, with flourishes of string quartets and brass trios in an attempt to keep the music as simple and natural as possible. His music harkens to Sigur Rós, Explosions in the Sky and Nick Drake.

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

Saudade: Autumn

September dances before my eyes 
            like white flame, eyelids

barely thick enough to shield
            against the burning. 

We talk for hours on the phone
            like our parents not that long ago. 

There is so much empty time,
            so many reasons not to leave

the house. We spend the day
            in silence, you sipping coffee,

me watching autumn leaves
             drift by in technicolor, reflected 

in the small pool of your iris.
            We hold our breath, pretending,

sift twilight with cool fingertips.
            I want to imagine a future

where you won’t leave,
            where there is someone 

to hold me in January
            when even the trees give up

trying to look presentable.
            A dark constellation of geese

tears its way
            through the late autumn sky.

I’ve been alone for so long
            why would anything change?  

Elegy

Before leaving the city, summer grows unbearable, 
wreathing its heaviness around me.
The F train is a lost cause,
but it keeps me company, takes me home;
scything through the darkness,
carrying memories this city has left behind
like teeth marks on my skin. A boy and I hold hands
in my childhood park and all I can look at
is the playground where I learned to be reckless.
I want to write an elegy to this city,
to midnight’s soft ache, how sometimes
all you can hear is the lone whistle
of a homeless man dragging recyclables 
behind him for some extra change.
I listen to the white noise of passing cabs,
hold my dog up to the window 
so we can take in the view together.
She will never know what it is like to be a visitor,
just passing through. I sit by the river, 
hoping to be unromanced by the night sky, 
spit out by the horizon, but it’s no use. 
The moon eyes me like a lover.

Coercion Aubade

I’ve told this story so many times
            it’s just words to me: a boy shatters

the glass panes of my chest,
            pale fingers roaming, his breath

a fetid bloom on my neck.
            I’m tired of writing this poem,

of explaining how a boy 
            teaches me to be a forest fire

when I did not ask to burn.
            Forgive me: maybe this

is what I get
            for being spineless, a body

hushed into silence,
            a body petaling into flame.