Half Mystic Radio, Season II, Episode VI: And All It Failed to Spare

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.

If you love Half Mystic Radio, you can spread the word with the hashtag #halfmysticspeaks, leave us a rating & review on your podcast platform of choice, or @ us directly on social media—@wearehalfmystic on all platforms!

Season II, Episode VI: And All It Failed to Spare is out now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts, or right here at Half Mystic:

Episode VI features Jihyun Yun’s poems “Savaging” & “Revisitations”, & Henry Finch’s song “Hessen”.

Jihyun Yun is a Korean-American poet, educator & Fulbright Research Fellow. A winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, her full length collection Some Are Always Hungry was published by The University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. She received her BA in Psychology from UC Davis, and her MFA from New York University where she was a fully funded fellow. Originally from California, she now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Henry Finch is author of the chapbook Reversing Falls (forthcoming SurVision 2021), winner of the 2020 James Tate International Poetry Prize. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his writing and translations appear in Apofenie, North American Review, Seattle Review, About Place, and many other journals. With Andra Rotaru, he co-edits Crevice (Romania). He lives in Berlin.

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

Savaging

(verb) The ethnological term for an animal maiming or killing her own offspring. Though observed in the wild and across various species, it most severely impacts pigs bred in captivity and subjected to severe environmental stressors.

Dear daughters, when the mind leaves
it leaves swiftly. Today I woke not knowing 
which country holds me or if those love 
motels stringing neon cords outside my window 
were those of Oakland or Seoul. I woke having 
forgotten even your faces, but remembered 
my hunger. What if this is all I am left with: 
memories of my young body rifling through refuse 
at the US bases, the slow arc of a dust-bloodied moon 
illuminating garbage: animal bones I picked through 
for their tears of toothed sinew, wads of gum 
studded with gristle and American spit. We did our best 
to rinse off the dirt, but that too is sustenance. 
After all, I’ve seen the hungry drink soups of mud 
or their own vomit and if pride serves no man, 
then let us be animal, full and unmoored 
from whatever shame names us human. We boiled 
trash in a big pot, watched the chicle bloom 
into nothing and broth, the bone’s faint bouquet 
of rot brought us kids to drooling. The stock boiled 
itself white. We spiced it with crushed cigarette butts
and wild weeds, called it 꿀꿀이죽, or oink-oink gruel
after the swine we had become. To this day, nothing
has tasted as good. Home that evening, my eldest sister 
seized me by the hair, throttled my face red for eating 
American garbage. You weren’t raised like this, 
you weren’t raised like this, but in a year, my sister 
in all her beauty and pride would be dead. It was like 
we already knew it back then, my girl body half-transformed 
into a pig, screeching its pink forfeit. My sister 
thrashing my wire-haired skin, weeping for all the lives 
neither of us would live. 

Revisitations

This is summer closing: sweet aloe drink and linger.
Plexiglass floors suspended over the wreckage
of some ancient neighborhood in what is now Mapo. 

An archeological treasure, to be preserved despite fire. 
Say one spark off a coal briquette kisses what it should not,
an arm of dried wood, or the lattice hem of a girl’s dress,

and hypothetically we are all engulfed in flames. 
Halmeoni kisses me temple to temple, eager to introduce me 
to her country but like a woman of my blood, 

she leads me back to ruin. And here is where the fire
could not be contained. See where the frameworks still stand.
These were homes. These were not excavated until after war. 

Thirty years after her war, she left this country. Thirty years
after that, she is returned to nothing familiar but the tongue
stunned with striving. But unmaking is what she knows, 

and so can best convey: The fire, she reads, the fire. 
The plexiglass beckons evening by illuminating what is left.
The landmark placards commemorate the blaze 

and all it failed to spare: livelihoods, lives and the bodies 
which vesseled them, shimmering their vanish in white-light 
relief. It is all very glamorous the way only memorials 

for tragedy can be. Above us, locusts make themselves known,
blow open August with their stutter and trill. A student lights up a smoke, 
taps ash over excavated remains of a city forever 

ablaze in history, and I remember across the sea, California’s
dry brush is burning. On television, we hear threats of whole countries
blazed to pre-conception and if the fires we tend end up taking us all 

who will write our eulogy? So much is changed I can hardly bear it,
Halmeoni says as the day yields. Where there was nothing, 
a mall. Where there were shanties, a bar. Not far from here,

I fell in love with a cigar factory heir. The building was
gray and huge. It covered everything in soot. Even our hair,
even the trees. We’d sit under the wax-wing leaves 

and listen to the cigar rolling machines— In dreams, I can see them 
adoring the day closed with their hands of ceaseless light. 
They could have been anyone. Dear lovers, dear moment in time, 

inevitably you will burn, as all living things do. 

But there are things even fire fails to eviscerate: morning’s onset, 
the suggestion of a woman unearthed among ash, all her lived loves 
large or small, sown within the hems of a charred girl’s dress.