"Nobody ever sees it coming, except for when they do." (Jessie Lynn McMains on Sforzando)

Jessie Lynn McMains (they/she) is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s eighth issue, sforzando. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications, including Memoir Mixtapes, Okay Donkey, Tiny Essays, Moonchild Magazine, and Barnhouse. They are the author of several chapbooks. Their book-length poem, The Loneliest Show On Earth, came out from Bottlecap Press in February 2020. They were the recipient of the 2019 Hal Prize for poetry, and were the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Racine, WI. They are editor/publisher of Bone & Ink Press. You can find their website at recklesschants.net, or find them on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie.

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We asked three of our Issue VIII contributors to share with us their personal definitions of sforzando: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Jessie Lynn McMains’ vision of the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering…

Nobody ever sees it coming / no exceptions at all, the World/Inferno Friendship Society sings. 

Everything is fine until the sudden force, the explosion, the breaking, the fall. The Tower. Nobody ever sees it coming, except for when they do. But even that’s only in retrospect, us-after-the-crash looking back and realizing there were signs. The force was not as sudden as we had thought. Maybe we even beckoned to it, invited it in. Said to the universe: Please drive faster. Said: Wait up, disaster! Maybe, sometimes, we have an inkling of what we’re summoning even as draw the circle on the floor.

There have been times in my life when I knew that a choice I was about to make would end in disaster. I mean of course the drugs, the drinking—but I also mean less overtly self-destructive things. Taking a road trip. Taking a lover. There are times when life is so much of the same over and over that I just need something to happen. Because sometimes things are safe, but safe doesn’t always mean good, and to build something better I must first wreck it all to ruins. I find myself too content for too long, and I know that contentment is just the shadow of complacency and I have to break something, shake it up. By which I mean, usually, I have to fall in love, or to fall out of love—

I think a lot of how those two acts, falling in and out, beginning a relationship and ending one, are more alike than they are different. The sudden force, and your life is upended. Why is it so painful to fall in love? I wrote in my journal when I was 17. It feels like my bones are about to come splintering through my skin. Everything aches. A first kiss can flatten you as good as a punch to the gut; the end of a romance can wind you better than a kick in the chest. Either way you’re broken open.

David Whyte writes: heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Leonard Cohen sings: there is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.

Whether we see it coming or not, the sudden force breaks us open. And we bear the marks of these breakings. Adam Fell writes: scars are left by / even the most delicate love.

Whether we see it coming or not, we can celebrate the scars, write odes to undoing. I think of the Japanese art of kintsugi: to emphasize the place of breaking, limn it with gold. Ander Monson writes: Own the ways we break. Understand that the fault lines of a mind or body are individual, and honor them. If love is a body, I can touch it and bow to the breakage.

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Jessie Lynn McMains’ poem “& I Need to Cling to Something”, along with twenty other pieces by contributors and three columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando, a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. It is available for preorder now.