Your Lore
ISSUE V — SPRING 2022
— imagery —
Fauna: A Collection
BY JELA MELI
Featuring Three Pieces:
Fauna
Apelpesia
Sybil
Goddess Series
BY CECELIA IVY OF ARTISTIC CHAOS STUDIO
Featuring Four Pieces:
Oya: Lady of Storms
Comizahual: The Jaguar Princess
U'tlun'ta: Spearfinger
Frøya: Mistress of Love
— prose —
Jupiter in the Mangroves
BY ADRIANA BELTRANO
Many paths will lead you down to the Jupiter beach.
Most will guide you to the bumpy sand with wooden staircases. Their handrails anchor into the tough concrete and, like the docks attached to some great ship, they invite you aboard to climb down and become marooned on the beach with nothing to do but drink barely alcoholic canned beverages and wade in the salty shallow sea.
The Necklace
BY JOANNA ELIZABETH BENITEZ
There was once a boy-man who drowned.
It happened one August afternoon when the lake known as Alegria replenished itself. He tried to swim. He stroked with his arms and kicked his legs but the warm waters engulfed him. A memory came to him then of Elder combing his hair. The lake is brimming with stories, she had said. Do not become one of them.
Birth of the Manananggal
BY ELSA VALMIDIANO
As much as the kili kili mumuwanted the citizens of Ináng-bayanto entirely turn against the mangkukulam, the mangkukulam were still secretly revered for their great power but continued to existin a covert way. Surreptitiously, the mangkukulam preserved their craft by mingling their ancient magical rites with the rituals of their invaders. Their magic once practiced openly for millennia, now had been disguised…
Good Gifts
BY JESSICA R. WOEHLER
Billows of breath escaped my lips in short, staccato measures as my lungs fought against the cold to regain some level of composure. Calf and ankle alike trembled under an entanglement of skirt and bloomer; never before had they been put to such violent and sudden use. The sole of my bare foot snapped a twig as I stumbled towards a pine, the full weight of my fear slumping against it. I froze, every muscle and fiber straining to hear a sound.
Jennarino and the Magic Clams
BY PETER CARELLINI
In the magical neighborhood of Bensonhurst, where all kinds of people thrived and laughed, lived a young Sicilian lady named Jennarino Sambuca. Jennarino, her gentle father Francesco and lively mother Christine, and her wise grandmother Vita lived in a two-story apartment passed down for generations; music, stories, and good food and company filled their home as the smell of delicious eggplant and gravy moved through the air.
Láthos
BY REBECCA CARLYLE
Why are doctor's offices so white, she wondered. To prove it was sterile? As if the strong disinfectant stinging her nose hairs wouldn’t be enough. She sat in the vinyl-covered chair that was for patients and let her eyes move from one labeled cabinet to the next; gloves, needles, patient robes, the list went on to words she wasn’t sure what they meant.
— poetry —
Inheritance
BY TABITHA LAWRENCE
This life which chose me,
Full of things unspeakable that I
never shut up about
Is making me obsessed with leaving something behind
For the children of the child I don’t even have yet.
Torn: A Collection
BY SHANNON ANDREA THOMAS
If home
Is where the heart is,
Then I understand
Why I am
Splintered.
Torn
Nehalennia
BY JENNA KAY DUXBURY
I guess I’m not the goddess
you were expecting.
The true meaning of my
name has been lost,
and I carry a bushel of apples
and a strange cloak,
rather than a burning torch
or a book of sacred texts.
Ancestors, Where Art Thou?
BY BRITTANY LAWRENCE
Sometimes I can see it flicker in the wind, far off in the distance. Only faintly visible each time a warm, youthful memory resurfaces. The candle of our family traditions.
With each passing relative, the traditions start to fade - Oh great grandmother. Oh young cousin gone too soon - so that the very thought of pretending things are still the same brings more grief than joy.