From the Editor: The Presto Issue
Sometimes my mind goes so fast that the rest of me can’t pause on one moment. Sometimes life, too, is a constant uptick of time clicking faster and faster on a dime. These proverbial claims ring true for me, for the most part, but I’m inclined to think life or thoughts or ideas aren’t a blur of movement so much as a collage of image and voice: layered, constant, revved, and singing.
That’s the positive version, and I’d like to stay there. This is the first issue I’ve edited since I joined the Half Mystic team, and I am so grateful to have been a part of its catching and integration. I mean it when I say the collection of works in Opus II, Issue I: Presto zips through my mind at regular and increasing intervals. Our theme right now is especially apt: some of these voices are high-pitched shreds of pulled fabric. Some are thick-waisted, chock-a-block, rumbling bass. Some rise and fall in between, skittering and dodging and spun. What I love about this issue is its awareness and allowance of that pace and flash and difference of all that is this and this and this present now: these are artists—writers, poets, seers—making their art in moments of genocide, climate collapse, and all the personal upheavals that dizzy ourselves in the universe.
But the works in the presto issue don’t add to the increase. Instead, they set a tempo. They don’t back away from what has failed them or what they have failed, and they don’t try to dig in any heels. Rather, they remix. They layer. They collage beauty and terror, to borrow from Rilke. They instruct us, implicitly and explicitly, to listen, look. They allow the images to bilnk as fast as they need, and they fix the eye on what is clear and conceivable in the cacophony. Let this beat of words and art, then, be a comfort and a mirroring, dear reader. Let it lend a shape to the presto pace of all we live right now. Let it be a song.
Opus II, Issue I celebrates the theme of presto: a sleight of hand, a piano flourish, a beat drop in a crowded bar, a mirrorball-spun hymn to a god of doors and light. It features the voices of Genevieve DeGuzman, [sarah] Cavar, Aurora Shimshak, Will Cordeiro, Harrison Hamm, Maggie Warren, E.B. Schnepp, xochi quetzali cartland, Grace Kwan, Suzannah Watchorn, Abigail Chang, Jesica Davis, Hannah Yerington, Ivi Hua, Annione Ryan Platten, and Morphic Rooms—and it is out now.