The Presto Letters
In our reading period for Opus II, Issue I: Presto, we received hundreds of love letters alongside your submissions: about music & hope, about poetry & survival, about your favourite ice cream flavours & the songs that keep getting stuck in your head. As always, your words made us laugh & thrill & cry & wonder, made us wake up & stand up, made us feel the spine of the why behind our work. Here is a smattering of our favourite notes accompanying submissions to the presto issue. Thank you, songbirds, for sharing your warmth with us. We don’t take it for granted.
Opus II, Issue I of Half Mystic Journal is a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, & prose celebrating a sleight of hand, a piano flourish, a beat drop in a crowded bar, a mirrorball-spun hymn to a god of doors & light. The presto issue is our most ambitious & evasive release yet. It lives on the currency of old dreams & new speed, & right at the moment when you think you’ve learned its dance, it dares you to circle back & look again.
I’m so excited to be back with another handful of poems for your delectation and, if suited, consideration for a spot in this new opus of Half Mystic.
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I was drawn to Half Mystic’s immersion in (obsession with?) music. I am similarly blessed and afflicted.
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I so appreciate the work you do—thanks for creating this unique space for literature and music to eddy out in one breath.
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I am a poet from the American Midwest. I am unpublished but alive. My father is a story. My mother is a dream.
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Take the tattoos I got after I heard Bleachers’ “Don’t Take the Money” for the first time, so moved by the lyrics that I immediately decided to emblazon “in my dreams, I’m to blame” across my thighs. That’s music—the sting of fresh ink.
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In an older sense of the word, to understand means “to stand among.” When I need to understand anything, I often stand among songs. When I was a homeschooled Evangelical, I craved songs more than ice cream, probably because most music was off-limits to me, and so I tried to sneak into deeper understanding of our “pagan” world through clandestine listening. I may have left that early fundamentalism, but I have never lost appreciation for how certain songs help us navigate the spaces where we supposedly belong.
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Yes, I’m one who comes to the page when my singing voice fails and the music continues.
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I discovered Half Mystic on Entropy and sharpened this sound-burdened story until it was ready to land in your inbox.
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I’m submitting this while drinking a chai and eating a blueberry scone with honey butter, and I wish such delight in your near future.
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Music as creation existed before silence, before chaos, in the all-ordering of things within time and space. Music as object impinges upon us from every corner: every bar and restaurant is filled with it for better or worse; the prisoners within Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were kept awake for days by such music—music as weapon. Music as protest and redemption we witnessed for a summer in 2020. Music as healing I witnessed when my mother and father would sing each other to sleep. And the music I revere most is music as joy—children laughing.
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I’m at the dark bar up the street from one of these poems, eating chicken and whiskey with my bare hands and trying to match the ‘90s music videos on the TV to the gritty playlist on the stereo. It’s summer, and because I teach for many hours during most of the year, it’s a precious time to stop scribbling and submit.
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I write poems because when I was in the third grade my parents refused me a piano, calling me fickle. I was devastated. Then in school I heard the term “lyric poetry,” and my young mind saw poetry as a way to compose something song-like without an instrument.
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I’m learning piano and rediscovering my love affair with Chet Baker, playing arrangements he played, feeling the way his songs land in me, often with the lyrics incorrect! I’ve also been reading Plath’s Winter Trees as I continue to find my rhythm at this particular time, which has been down in the bass end of things, but with its own sort of presto.
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Thank you for the opportunity to submit this musical stim of a poem, inspired by an Indigo Girls song and a splatter-worthy pan of pasta sauce and an autism diagnosis at age 45.
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Hello from the salty left coast. I’ve been listening to Alanis Morissette lately, and have renewed appreciation of her rage and range. Makes me want a “Death by Chocolate” scoop. You know what I mean.
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Please find attached three poems I feel complement your theme of presto, as in a bit of magic, or sudden enlightenment (in Zen the word is “satori,” which I think reflects the essence of a good poem).
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I’ve chosen your magazine as a potential home for my poems because I feel like a half mystic most days (fear of commitment, maybe).
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This has been the strangest winter. From January until early March, we saw almost no snow, and I bicycled to most of my classes because the weather was so nice. Now that we’re nearing April, however, there are piles of snow everywhere, and it feels like time is slipping backward, instead of forward, into spring.
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As someone constantly simultaneously running towards and from… everything, Half Mystic’s theme of presto feels a bit like magic in and of itself.
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Dear ones, can we dream of a bookstore that sells ice cream together? Half Mystic found me and language is sound first, so shows me my daughter.
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I’m currently writing a spaghetti Western limited series for FX and have rarely been happier than the first time I typed the words, “INTERIOR: SALOON.” I’ll give it all up if you’re looking for a good bass player.
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These are poems of grieving. They call upon my ancestors smoking cornsilks under starwet Alabama pines. Reciting Kaddish to the ocean after asylum. They are rites of death and oneiromancy. They get stoned. They play with guns. They believe in revolt. There is an unspoken banjo involved. It hasn’t had a drink in years. This is vagrant poetry reaching for a holy land hidden behind the slow trains of a spiritual mutt lineage. It’s the trajectory of mysticism broken apart. An autobiographical ghost story. An elegy in pieces.
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Music is the wisdom of holding space for both fear and peace inside the body’s chambers.
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Your press attracts me because of its mystery, the mystery of “half.” I wonder if music is the half and being a “mystic” is the other half, the way we only see one side of the moon.
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What does music mean to me? A visa to the inexpressible, to the numinous, to everything.
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I live a limited life with congenital heart disease that forces me to observe rather than do. Writing helps me be in this strange world, in our little family of profound health issues in which music comes from a drum set, a cello, two beagle throats, my own irregularly beating heart and, if we really listen, from the condiments in the fridge and foliage outside our windows.
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This work has been a direction in my mind from the moment I first heard a violin played. My relationship with the instrument has been fundamental to the shaping of my relationship with my body and with other bodies. I am the sole violin player today across both maternal and paternal bloodlines. I have felt drawn to bring musicmaking to the page as a site of intergenerational encounter.
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Music is the memory of other lives unlived, and I found you from friends I made in books.
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I LOVE BUTTERSCOTCH—on ice cream, in ice cream, as well as ice cream. Much as the pear plays second fiddle to the apple, so butterscotch has had to take a back seat to chocolate. This madness must stop!
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In my writing, I turn to the musicality of language to help me encounter and recognize complexity—to tap into what I both can and cannot say. For this work, especially, I lean into music to embody, express, and question desire beyond what I am capable of fully understanding.
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I have included three pieces that focus on the idea of energy and running from what has been. I love your emphasis on the esoteric and excitable, something I hope to capture in my writing.
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The piece’s climax occurs during a flashback to a concert hall where the pure exhilaration of music and dancing allows the protagonist to “... inherit the weightlessness of light.” (That line should also count as a description of what music means to me.)
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Every poem is a journey and every journey a poem. I hope my journeys strike a respondent chord.
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My local independent bookstore is Jeffreys Books in Malvern, not far from where I live. It’s a kind of Aladdin’s cave of sumptuous art books, novels old and new, cookbooks, puzzles and the most original greeting cards I’ve ever seen.
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Somewhere between the mosh pit and heaven, I write little stanzas in well-guarded notebooks in the hope of providing an unassuming life with beauty and justification.
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The story makes events separated by decades simultaneous in the moment of perception, as music sometimes can.
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Current obsessions include: glitter, decomposition, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the mushrooms growing on my kitchen counter.
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Your mission of celebrating music in all its forms really encapsulates the piece’s feeling of listening to your favourite song on repeat. That homesick feeling of knowing the end, but being so joyful in experiencing all that’s come before.
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In this work, hearing is an ontological presencing that slips us between hear & here, because the speaker is always attempting to hear whether or not the “you” at the end of the address/telephone line is actually there. Something acousmatic happens in this desperate longing. The text is the body is the sound.
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Apartment hunting in New York City ten years ago, we noticed at one open house a Tony statuette unostentatiously tucked into a hall closet and imagined lively musical parties in the place. We bought the apartment and their baby grand piano, which we now happily play, presto or lento according to mood.
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I read your synaesthesia volume (I’m a former synaesthete myself, but alas only until I hit adolescence, or adolescence hit me) and fell in love with it. I am now on a quest to find a copy of the saudade paper volume, as I am moving to Portugal in September.
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I played trumpet in middle and high school, and I still feel music as a buzz on my lips.
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I’m submitting for your theme presto because I happen to love stage magicians. I especially love how a good stage magician manages to tap into the mystery of life itself, bringing to mind both the terror of our tenuous tightrope walk over reality and the odd, glimmering comfort that can come from the very same fear.
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I am attaching one poem inspired by Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony.” It was the first complete symphony I heard at the age of five, and it was a “hey, presto!” experience.
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My mate and I recently drove over Route 66’s Musical Road outside Tijeras, New Mexico, and when I posted what a shiver it was to feel music in every cell of my body, an old friend replied, “Isn’t that always how you feel music?” Music is atomic and cosmic. Music permeates every aspect of my life. It’s breath, challenge, and ecstasy.
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I learned about your press a handful of years ago and was struck by the conduit you identified through music and into the world of prose writing. I have always been envious of muscic’s ability to move the physical body. I have the desire to write like a song is sung, with emotion you can feel in your body and words that aren’t satisfied with being hummed.
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If Sylvia Plath had met Erik Satie in a landscape of obscure sorrows, I’d like to think I could have played a small accompaniment—maybe a fugue in G minor.
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I love pretty much all ice cream ever dreamed up. It is the ultimate proof of humanity’s self-defeating genius. I’d send you my “Boog’s Boogie Sauce” playlist, but I’m too self-conscious. Also, Jackson Street Booksellers right here in Omaha is surely the finest used bookstore in the Milky Way.
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My healing process has involved multiple guitars and I have finally settled on a pink Stratocaster whose growl feels Dionysian and primal.
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I love the ice cream with little cheesecake chunks—y’know? And in Ann Arbor, I loved Literati Bookstore; in Boston, Trident Booksellers & Cafe is my favorite so far.
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My favorite ice cream flavor is peach. And the venerable Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, here since the 1930s, reminds us all of what it means to browse.
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This piece is all vibrato, similes appearing and disappearing like unreliable courage.
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At the moment, I am listening to Jonathan Biss play the presto movement to a Beethoven piano sonata and thinking about the container of Caribbean coconut ice cream waiting for me in the freezer.
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In assembling these, I tried to inhabit the theme—a certain quickening pace, energetic leaps and images, a hope toward transmutation. All attempts at alchemy, like most poems are.
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I believe my work may be a good fit for the presto theme because the speaker in each poem is “bewitched by the myth of movement.” They are empowered, healed by dance, fascinated with and educated by the movements of other beings. I was born with mobility challenges, and while surgeries were essential, it was music and nature that helped me walk. In my poems, timbre is my uncle soothing with “Ring of Fire” as we play with mud, and I imagine I am a snail within my body cast. Rhythm is my mother strolling, complex as a fiddler crab, to teach me coordination; melody is me, twisting my hips to summon baby porcupines for protection.
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Noname’s newest album is worth an altar in your house, and if you’re ever in Port Angeles, Washington, you should try the ice cream at our little local joint: Welly’s. The owner has been working with my farm since she registered her business, and is one of the classiest acts in the whole of America’s fraught and scandalous dairy industry. Recommendation: Strawberry, New Zealand style, on the pier, listening to Sundial.
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Music is an inexplicable emotional landscape, a sense that there is something within us that is also without us—and a way to search for, articulate, and navigate that which we share with the world. It offers the ability to express something inexpressible by a body but still deeply embodied.
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As a pianist, presto often strikes me with a dangerous, mysterious imagery, as if the world can come undone in all precarious gestures at any moment. I find presto most powerful when the sense of danger is near, imminent, yet latent—the tightened bowstrings, the calm before the storm, the emotional instability with yet a resolution.
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I’ll be noodling with chord progressions, melodic runs, and basslines until the day I die.
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One of the work’s tenets, remixed from Shakespeare: “If music be the proof of love, then play on.” This is about playing on, and playing through to the end, whenever, however, wherever that end may come; it is about tuning into music and dance as the ultimate pulse by which to sync up your soul’s movements; it is about the nature of storytelling as part of that which is imperishable and belongs to the impossible; it is a mutable feast with music as a main course.
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I hope that in reading my writing, you like what you hear.
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These are an attempt to find a chord that could carry us home.
Responses have been edited for length & clarity.
Half Mystic Journal’s eleventh issue, centred on the theme of presto, is open for preorder now. Dropping on June 18th, Opus II, Issue I flirts with sun & darts to darkness, sings of man-made magick, blurred vision, glitter in the shadows, an aria half-lucid & bewitched by the myth of movement. We’d love to send it to your doorstep for summer nights ahead.