"A ringing clarity, followed by smoke. Deliberate naughtiness." ([sarah] Cavar on Presto)
[sarah] Cavar is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto. They are an anti-genre writer, PhD candidate, and instructor of undergraduates on both U.S. coasts. The author of Failure to Comply (Featherproof Books, 2024), Cavar edits manywor(l)ds.place, and has had work published in The Offing, Split Lip Magazine, Nat. Brut, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. More at www.cavar.club, librarycard.substack.com, and @cavarsarah on Twitter.
We asked three of our Opus II, Issue I contributors for their personal definitions of presto: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is [sarah] Cavar’s vision of a sleight of hand, a piano flourish, a beat drop in a crowded bar, a mirrorball-spun hymn to a god of doors and light…
A protracted litany of unexpected happenings brought me to “This Event May Contain Singing,” my poem in Half Mystic Journal’s eleventh issue. The first was making writer friends, the kind who invited me to their Discord servers and celebrated my work and talked me down when necessary. These friends—specifically nat raum—led me to the 2024 Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Kansas City, Missouri, the physical container in which the poem took shape. nat asked me to share a hotel room with them; suddenly, presto! I was there, after years of watching in a state of secondhand overwhelm as the people I knew only in text suddenly materialized.
I am not often surrounded by a lot of people. I’m scared of crowds, I’m enraged by loud noises, I loathe staying out past 8 P.M. Yet I experienced all of that at AWP, in addition to hawking my debut novel. I met new friends and old ones, almost all, for the first time, in the flesh. I bought too many books. I received free zines. I attended panels. I learned that I am allowed to feel good, and write, and even write about feeling good (which Chen Chen taught me at our shared queer open mic). I listened as Leila Chatti spoke the epigraph to my poem, the torture is not the gift, the poetry is, one corollary to its suddenness: like Mary Oliver’s soft animal, which concludes “This Event,” Chatti’s front-bookend is an ode to constancy amid massive change. The poetry is the gift. The animal we are, soft, or softening. As for everything else? I mean, who the fuck knows.
Here is what I know. I have not felt more comforted by a crowd than I have these last long months, holding signs and shouting Free Palestine amid new and newfound kin. I wore my keffiyeh each day of the conference, attended panels whose opening remarks acknowledged AWP’s institutional failure to condemn genocide, to honor Palestinian writers as creatives and as people. I felt seen as a Jew whose opposition to genocide is firm, and whose commitment to liberation—by any and all means necessary—feels akin to an openness of craft. This moment demands new tactics, new methods, new intimacies; certainly, in the months since AWP, both escalating terror and escalating global solidarity have made that demand all the more significant.
As I returned to the conference center damp and satisfied from Friday’s dawn hike, I didn’t realize I was walking into a demonstration. We gathered at the passageway from the registration tables to the book fair, taking care to leave room for passersby. Some joined us, others looked studiously at the ground. Organizers took turns reading the names of children under five murdered by the Israeli Occupying Forces since October. By my recollection, the readers had perhaps begun on the names of the four-year-olds when the entire group was forced out of the building by power-drunk conference police.
The purpose of the reading was multifaceted. It was to gather and to mourn, and to do so disruptively—to interrupt the order of things, the conference, the decorum expected of writers. An underlying whiteness (to which I am not immune) designed to poison us into submission, stanch our creativity, foreclose collective knowledge. The pleasure and abrupt, sublime hope I gesture toward in this poem are moments of profound kinship with persons and groups and objects and notions that together form the architecture of my craft. What would my craft be, we and I, if not for the lovers I share us with?
Here is what presto is to me: a space of spontaneous nowness. A ringing clarity, followed by smoke. Deliberate naughtiness. Pleasure, pain, work, play, discovery, assurance, all together. The moments I describe and collect as “This Event May Contain Singing” are ones I never thought would come true. I never believed I would have friends on other coasts willing to pass out next to me after a day of conferencing, never thought I’d feel so held by people who know my innermost workings but not the color of my eyes.
And here we are, feeling together, in this moment of magic that we—we, not literary institutions, not grants, not funders, we—make possible. Presto, meaning, I love you. From the river to the sea.
As of this writing, 36,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 81,000 have been wounded by the Israeli army since October 7, 2023. The death rate of the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank is higher than any other major 21st century conflict. Learn more and donate to relief funds on the ground.
[sarah] Cavar’s “This Event May Contain Singing” is featured alongside twenty other pieces in Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. The presto issue sings of man-made magick, blurred vision, glitter in the shadows, an aria half-lucid and bewitched by the myth of movement. The music is real, the body electric and imaginary. Issue XI lives on the currency of old dreams and new speed, and right at the moment when you think you’ve learned its dance, it dares you to circle back and look again. It is available for preorder now.