Half Mystic Radio, Season II, Episode III: Who They Have to Answer To
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.
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Season II, Episode III: Who They Have to Answer To is out now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts, or right here at Half Mystic:
Episode III features Lyd Havens’ poems “Unruly” & “206 Days Later”, & Marla Bendini’s song “Blossom”.
Lyd Havens is a poet currently living in Boise, Idaho. Their work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Shallow Ends, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. They are the author of the chapbook I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here (Nostrovia! Press, 2018), the winner of the 2018 ellipsis… Poetry Prize, and a 2019 finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. Lyd is currently a senior at Boise State University, where they will graduate with a BFA in Creative Writing in 2021.
Marla Bendini is a transgender, non-binary visual and performance artist, club personality, musician, pole and aerial artist based in Singapore. Her trans identity and practice are profoundly interrelated. She created her persona in 2007 as an amalgamation between art and life, to explore multiple liminal identities and fluidity in perspectives. It was also to explore how the trans body allows one to occupy a new artistic space and challenge current understandings of identity.
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 III right here. Thank you for listening, dear songbirds. Half Mystic loves you.
Unruly
I ask, what makes a wild horse wild?
and he says, who they have to answer to.
I remember the herd of donkeys
who crossed the highway in Beatty,
leisurely and with intention. I told my mother
I admired the anarchy of them.
I called them wild, and my mother said,
but aren’t all donkeys wild in a way?
I try to picture wild horses, no Rolling Stones
present, and see only unruly speed.
Self-made dust. Broken necks and calluses.
I’m from the town where Tom Mix
was bludgeoned with a suitcase full of poker chips
before drowning. We used to get half
a week off of school for the rodeo.
The only true horses I’ve known were in upstate New York
and Maine. I was so small then, and knew
I was trusting the horse not to throw me into the tall grass
and run off into a thicket somewhere.
I held its mane like a ferris wheel until I was back
on the ground, my own two feet trembling
and insignificant next to its hooves. Fourteen years later,
and my feet resemble the desert
in more ways than one. My boots are heavy,
double-knotted and caked with red dirt. I take
gulps of soda and shudder. I only think
about horses in the winter now. He asks,
how about we get out of here?, and I do not answer.
206 days later
This time, there’s no one around to call me back behind
the screen door—I wander to the bricks muddy
with my own handprints. The air is humid here;
I collect it in my hands. There’s a fingerprint-shaped scar
on the nape of my neck that only I have touched. A crater
on the moon no one’s landed on. I count my bones
just to be sure. There’s a fountain where I’ve only ever seen
people steal pennies instead of offer them. I wish
I could walk barefoot forever. I wish I knew how to cartwheel.
Once, a girl I thought I would marry made a list
of all the people we had collectively lost in our lives:
let’s name our children after them. I think I will always be
a slab of July cement, attracting only mosquitoes
and cherry syrup. I feel empty the way a museum
can be empty. I count my bones just to be sure,
as if a part of me takes off in the night while I sweat
myself to sleep.