Lemonade (This Bird)
New essay by Meghan Lennox | Artwork by Molly Segal
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
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Today’s love bite is a micro-essay from Meghan Lennox with artwork by Molly Segal:
Lemonade (This Bird) by Meghan Lennox | Artwork by Molly Segal
On July 20, 1997, after 22 years, 8 months and 14 days of human form, my sister turned into a bird. That very first day, a finch—she perched, beak open, eyes to the sky, on the hood of my parents’ car, waiting for them in the hospital parking garage; unflinching as my father opened the passenger side door; stock-still as the leather seat accepted the weight of my mother’s collapsed will.
People were initially uncomfortable, then soon relieved, that my mother had found solace in the ghost inhabiting various birds that came to visit her. But the day my sister became a cockatiel, landing and settling on my mother’s shoulder for at least three minutes during her vacation to Key West, even the bartender took out his camera and everyone started addressing the bird by sister’s name…
Read Lemonade (This Bird).
Featured writer Meghan Lennox began writing on any surface that would support a #2 pencil at a young age. While teaching high school English, she began studying creative writing at the New School before abruptly abandoning NY for a career in film in LA. There, Meghan cast several features for Sony, multiple Network pilots and produced the indie feature 'Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town.' After a decade of hiding away her own writing, she wrote and directed her first short film 'Show Pony,' starring Britt Lower and Clara McGregor, which premiered at the 2022 Sarasota Film Festival. Meghan has spent the last year writing—screenplays, flash fiction, creative nonfiction —and is grateful to have picked up that pencil again. She lives in Los Angeles with her two indubitably hilarious boys, Jack and Hudson.
Molly Segal is a Los Angeles based painter. Born and raised in Oakland, Segal is interested in sites where disaster and decadence converge. Her large scale watercolors explore fragile connections and finite resources, in particular the price of survival in inhospitable climates. Her paintings have been exhibited at Charlie James Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Zevitas Marcus Gallery. She was an inaugural artist-in-residence at the Quinn Emanuel Artist Residency in Los Angeles in 2021. Her work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Whitehot Magazine, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2013.
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Leigh Hopkins
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