Half Mystic Radio, Season I, Episode IV: Love Only In Hurricanes
Welcome to Episode IV of Season I of Half Mystic Radio! We’re thrilled to share that HMR is now available on all of your favourite podcast platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, & Soundcloud. You can subscribe to the podcast for free, & stream all episodes on those platforms now. Please also leave a rating & review if you enjoy Half Mystic’s work, so that we can reach more listeners!
If you prefer to listen in here, Episode IV: Love Only In Hurricanes is out now—
This episode features Wanda Deglane’s poems "Aubade For a Nonexistent Child" & "September", & the Woodlands’ song "Age of Atlas (Mellow Mix)".
Wanda Deglane is a 19-year-old Capricorn from Arizona. She is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants and attends Arizona State University. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming from Rust + Moth, Glass Poetry, L’Ephemere Review, and Former Cactus, among other lovely places. Wanda is the author of Rainlily (2018), as well as three forthcoming chapbooks. The Woodlands are Hannah and Samuel Robertson, a wife and husband singer-songwriter duo. Their songs are crafted of wonder and exploration, both within and faraway—poetic lyrics on ribbons of melody that wander the musings of human emotion. Their songs have been featured in over a hundred TV shows, ads, films and documentaries. The Woodlands have circled back around again to Oregon to continue living a simple and quiet life, waiting to be lured yet again by faraway travel and the writing of more songs.
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Thanks to popular demand from listeners, we’re excited to tell you that we are also sharing the full text of the poems in each episode from now on. Here we are…
Aubade For a Nonexistent Child
i am full of you.
i am full of you.
no longer quietly burning, but now a self-contained explosion
wanting to consume the flamed edges of my world.
think bursting. think of lemons, fallen to the forgotten earth in july,
their skin cracking and bleeding soft and sour.
oh god, how i love you. i love you like the sweet-sour
punching blood of pomegranates. i love you
like the colors i don’t yet have names for.
i love you so much, i need
to destroy you.
my silence
blooms screaming like a bruise beneath my chest.
my begging howls find their way out
when the city is drained of color, dawn,
and only the tired highways hear me,
their legs crumbling beneath them. people perish.
i look at my reflection for comfort, all ghostly yellow and
violent blue, but she weeps and tells me,
i’m terrified.
my sweet moon offering. my tiny shadow.
my flattened juniper, squished like veins, crushed like lungs.
my silver and beaming orange. my persephone
come to steal back the cold.
i pray the hollow of my organs squeezes the barely-formed life
out of you. the most painless of bloodbaths.
i pray you die so quick, you never get to reach out
your new fingers and find a home in my vermillion.
that you may only know life as this microscopic, blurry seed.
that you never drink of this urban honey, this smog and desperation.
that you never have to cry out in a world
that slowly makes a feast of you. that you may never
receive the gifts i have left for you: raw, unrefined terror
and the phantoms of dreams.
that you may never have to know your grandfather’s fists,
or your mother’s hesitations.
my rose, my apricot, there is only one thing i know:
everything i touch begs for life.
i pray i never live to touch you.
September
September is another thing for me to carry / that ten-ton grain of mist / sitting comfortable on my back / September is preschool-aged trauma / refusing to let go of my hand / slipping moon-colored glasses over my eyes / flowers become rats become child-sized skeletons / September is heat stewing in its own uncertainty / lingering in the doorway of its own unwant / it’s tiny piranhas / taking bites out of all my night terrors / my organs are studded with diamond / like unnecessary beauty / like there’s something inside me that needs to escape so desperately / it’ll shred everything it touches on its way out / I love only in hurricanes / I’m gripping my rage by the throat / then making her breakfast in the morning / I am crying plateaus into thick-scarred canyons / holding all my potential in my hands / this gift thrumming sure like a pulse / I am accepting that there is something inside me / that needs to ache right now / grape soda cans and bee-crowned honeysuckles / my therapist points out my reflection / says, look at this / look at how crazily, dizzily, drastically you’ve improved / I touch my cheek / I say, jesus fucking christ I’m glowing / the sky sheds its own melancholy / and washes the insides of my rib cages clean