Issue X of Half Mystic Journal is a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose celebrating music in all its forms. This issue showcases the theme of elegy: the last dropped petal—the mirror in mourning—the light still on for what was once beautiful. As we reach the end of Half Mystic’s first act, we look back on the years stolen or borrowed, hold our grief open and stand very still in the strain of song that washes from its depths.

Issue X features the voices of Philip Schaefer, Gavin Yuan Gao, Brittany Adames, Meg Reynolds, Anthony Thomas Lombardi, DeeSoul Carson, Katrinka Moore, Emily Zogbi, Paola Bennet, Geoff Anderson, Esther Kim, Emma Chan, Esther Sun, Tori Grant Welhouse, Taylor Gianfrancisco, Topaz Winters, Abby E. Murray, Laura Mei Roghaar, and Maria Chiara Piglione.

There is no place here that death doesn’t circle, no vacuum that silence didn’t fill long ago. Issue X is a prayer against forgetting, a promise to bear witness even where music falls short. And when the time comes to let go of what it can’t live without, the elegy issue knows what it means to wake into memory. It knows that in a world touched by song, there exists no such thing as extinction.

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