Lemon Star Mag Issue 2

February 2019

Issue 2 Staff

Editor in Chief: Sylvia CollingsProse Editor: Kimber Grey Poetry Editor: Ashley TaylorReaders: Brent Coughenour, Maddy Hamilton, Gabriela Marchany, Brittnay Jackson Content and Workshop Coordinator: Bridget Dixon  Social Media Coordinator: Sara La CottiEditorial Intern: Alec JamesSocial Media Intern: Gabriela Marchany

Picture by Sylvia Collings

Contributors Poetry: Micaela Walley Qurat Dar Sam Shaw Erynn Pontius Ellora Sutton

Prose:Unfortunately, our prose submissions were few and far between. The ones we received didn’t fit our aesthetics.

Micaela Walley Heaven, If She’s Up There

I guess I’d be the one in weathered jute unstained napkin crumpled in my palm with grandma in her yellowed robe irate I forgot picking lemon frosting glazed crumbs from her plate as I suck each one off her puckered finger tips

Qurat Dar Brahmin

All the old gods in my blood try to forget themselves into nonexistence, rather than relive how much more it hurts to have been abandoned after being loved, supplicated for centuries. Their sigils seared into my DNA, feathered/ furred messengers lurking in my dreams knowing no oracle awaits them. Faith resists conquerors, colonizers more than bodies can, but I shed my holiness like a second skin, cast off the vestments of lineage, burn the language from my throat. Visit new humiliations on the ancient ones, turn every benediction upon my ancestors into a curse. I am a sacred cemetery, a burial ground, a monastery/temple/mosque of dying gods, and somehow still find it in myself to live.

My mother’s powder room

Floral wallpaper that never quite made it to all the edges, she labored alone, soaked its weight in water before plastering it to the walls, struggling with the bulk of it, the impossibility of covering the thrashing bones of our house. I can still see the old paint around the light switch, by the baseboards, I wonder how much of our exteriors are from those who owned us. If you can still see old layers of paint around our edges, see where our lacquer’s chipped, the wallpaper peeling. I think about how well flowers and grief go together. How mothers always end up in florals. How the powder room is more my mother than any other in my childhood home.

Sam Shaw legends & yellow space & words we can’t say

fingers that fill yellow places that trace copper letters on my cheekwith salt because we can’t say them aloud flowers that listen wheni dream & blossom when i cry i believe in golden feathers &fairytales to fill in the vacant space i believe in legends & truth& you make my eyelids fall your chipped fingernails crackeddry knuckles they are a torn invitation touch mine & yoursour shared spaces are better than warm hands and burnt tonguesthat taste & mouths that curve around the words we can’t say

the bird & you

the creature filled her nest, she stole some string --you filled my house, my hands, my heart replete woven into a wreath, a white-bright thing --your easiness a flame with searing heat.

a tiny ring, a tid-bit of tin foil the black-bearded bird’s nest not made of war, but of thievery is it a fair spoil her home within the lofty sycamore.

it shone in through the shattered windowpane her fragmented palmprint a testament the brokenness, an elegy maintained disrupts the quiet space, recalcitrant.

a print was all you left with me alone and the stealing sparrow followed you home.

Erynn Pontius Lily of the Valley

I scratch moss off of tree trunks with my fingernails. Whispering in exhales of dew cold droplets of condensation coupling the rugged outline of pallid lips begging to linger.

When raindrops splatter on my eyelashes I let it soak me. Drench my cheeks and chest sprinkle my neck in tears, trickle beneath my skin and blood drip down my ribs one by one. When it pools in my core I am called awake. I carry handfuls of lily of the valley. The delicate thrill of poison so carelessly wisped beneath my nose, simple and sweet. I weave them in my hair and watch my fingers mash white petals into a pulp, sticky with wax and nectar nectar so sweet, I lick.

I lay down in clay feel the ferns curling around my wrists and ankles binding me to earth, to the promise I made.

Come for me tracing damp clumps of green scraped from the bark with an offering

of milk and apples. I’ll sprinkle in your cup the sugar burning on my tongue.

Ellora Sutton Soup

I am the coronary blockage in a whale’s vein, the clot, the full-stop, the dead- weight. My eyes are buoyed with salt, dust on a clock’s hour-hand. My bones rattle aimlessly from one joint to the next to the one after

knives bend under roseate weight, warp and twist into bloodied paperchains. A whole little kid party of sharp things. The Bunsen heat of all the years cumulates. Warps. Twists. Sharp becomes coastal. Blood becomes jelly and ice-cream.

On nights where the sky has been cleaved descaled of its mackerel skin and from its pores white noise oozes in sheathes of unfinished sheet music, with my head-sounds bleached by such raw nothing I can let myself exist. I can let myself think. Blank is blank is blank, bless.

A sink older than my knuckles cradled the broil of my mother’s hair. It has been bleached a million times since and is ripe for scrying. Sometimes I pretend to drown myself in it, eyes shut, playing at being a toddler clagging through a blue whale’s veins. They carry so much forever on their backs, the weight of all that ancient water and salt.

Author Bios:

Micaela Walley is a recent graduate from the University of South Alabama. Her work can also be found in Oracle Fine Arts Review, Occulum, and ENTROPY. She currently lives in Hanover, Maryland with her best friend—Chunky, the cat.

Qurat Dar is an engineering student at the University of Guelph and an emerging author. She has work forthcoming or currently in The Evansville Review, Augur Magazine, The Temz Review, and Anathema Magazine, among others. She was also recently a finalist in the 2018 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (CFSW) and an Emerging Scholar at the 2019 Arts Everywhere Festival.

Sam Shaw has been writing since she could hold a crayon — creating multicolored, fantastical worlds that she and her friends might inhabit for a little while. Presently, she is studying English, Spanish, and Education at Salem College. She has been published in Incunabula, Havok, and Governor’s Living Magazine and continues to create magic (nowadays with pens instead of crayons).

Erynn Pontius works at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She graduated with honors from the University of Utah with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Rhetoric Studies and a minor in Creative Writing. Most recently, her poems and short stories have been featured in Capulet Magazine, The Dying Dahlia Review, Burning House Press, The Hungry Chimera Literary Magazine, and the Canticle Literary Journal.

Ellora Sutton, 22, is a museum gift shop worker based in a small village in Hampshire, UK. Her work has been published or is forthcoming by The Cardiff Review, Eye Flash Poetry Journal, Blue Marble Review, Young Poets Network, Constellate Magazine, and The Hellebore. She was also commended in the 2018 Winchester Poetry Prize.