Introducing Sevdah

After two years of frenetic movement, there is a holiness in the act of slowing to a halt, no matter the stitch in our side, the catch in our breath. As Half Mystic’s presto era comes to a close, we’re grateful to you for running & dreaming with us, for keeping pace with our sun-caught stumbling & impulsive vanishing. Opus II, Issue I: Presto is available to purchase in paperback & PDF—a sleight of hand, a glow stick rave, a dare to look again. We couldn’t be prouder to share our most ambitious, evasive release yet with you.

& now it’s time to reach toward a new kind of desire, slow & fathomless, helpless as hope, brazen as song. Welcome, dear songbirds, to sevdah.

For our twelfth issue, we consider the underside of Issue II’s saudade theme. We want your best poetry, prose, & visual art of violin solos, velvet on bare skin, half lights, broken odes, empty airport terminals, redamancy, zinnias at the edge of wilting, damask curtains, clipped swans’ wings, inosculation, heroic crowns, the memory of a late-night lake with a long-gone lover, when the sky and water turned the same colour & met at the edge of the world. Sevdah is a genre of Turkish & Bosnian folk music evoking sorrowful love & ecstatic, amorous yearning—from the Arabic “sawda,” meaning “black bile,” or a melancholy state of longing.

The new issue will be released in June 2025, & submissions are open now. Moor us in the still before the train comes, the grace of the unquenchable. Give us a begging to believe in.