Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity | Yo También | cento for Ella, Danny's mom, from books in his library
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
Issue 16’s Featured artist Rosemary Meza-DesPlas is a multidisciplinary artist who works in drawing, painting, installation, fiber art, performance, and video. Rosemary was born and raised in the Dallas, Texas suburb of Garland. Her mother, from Allende (Coahuila), Mexico, came to the United States as a migrant farm worker; her father grew up in Tampico, Mexico. The tenacity of her eight aunts in the face of personal tragedies and adversities was an early inspiration; their narratives contributed to her embrace of feminist ideology. She says of her work:
I created Yo También in 2018 as a response to the #MeToo movement. It is hand-sewn human gray hair (hair of the artist) on black twill fabric, 25 x 21 inches. While #metoo was hyped by Hollywood women, it began with Black activist, Tarana Burke. It is a movement which directly impacted Latinas due to socio-economic limitations and cultural stigma. As a Latina, I am acutely aware of the pervasiveness of sexual violence within my culture. The utilization of my gray hair is a nod to women and aging; thus, referencing societal expectations on beauty.
Read Yo También.
Issue 16’s Featured writer Ryleigh Wann is the music editor for Flypaper Lit and is the founder and organizer of The Swampera Room Reading Series, a project in Wilmington, NC that supports local writers to share their work with an audience and engage with creative writing. Ryleigh’s hybrid prose, “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity” is titled after an art installation by the same name, by Yayoi Kusama:
“A glass of bourbon and two cigarettes deep, fled from a hurricane in the Blue Ridge after a few short weeks in my graduate program, with people I was just beginning to know, someone asked which moment of all our moments we would want to relive. One girl said her wedding day. Someone else mentioned their time living abroad, climbing mountains. I pondered, stuttering around my newly drunken friends. When I visited Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” exhibit at The Cleveland Museum of Art…”
Read Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity.
Issue 16 is a brilliant farewell to our current team of curated writers: Bazeed, Amy Estes, Tammy Heejae Lee, and Lorena Hernández Leonard, and artists: Hyun Jung Ahn, Tyler James Bangkok, Theano Giannezi, and Farangiz Yusupova. Every month, for four months in a row, this team has surprised us with their artmaking! Check out Issue 16’s highlights below.
An exciting note: Amy Estes and Lorena Hernández Leonard’s essays were recently featured in Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub—and now Khôra!
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
If you'd like to enter the collaborative waters of Khôra, information about Khôra's 500 Words will be coming soon. In the meantime, subscribe and swim around in our space.
Big love,
Leigh
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
Issue 16 Highlights
untitled cento for Ella, Danny’s mom, from books in his library by Bazeed / Artwork by Theano Giannezi
“Sensing time’s discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones
grazing my fingertips
I was talking to my mother when she died.
It seemed to me to be a sermon.
All the anxiety had fled.
In love with velocity,
the sun paused.
In love with velocity,
I saw one woman dancing
then the sun buckled and dark fell like a shout….”
Read untitled cento for Ella, Danny’s mom, from books in his library.
Won’t Someone Think Of The Women? by Amy Estes / Artwork by Tyler James Bangkok
“One Sunday morning, the summer before I started seventh grade, I arrived at my girls Sunday School class to see piles of pink boxes on the table at the front of my classroom instead of the usual stack of musty brown Bibles, the fragrance of oily sugar dancing in the air. I involuntarily squealed. My classmates and I buzzed with curiosity, as this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in our Sunday School class, or maybe ever at church. As we took our seats, each of us were given a string of raffle tickets, neatly ripped from a hot pink spool….”
Read Won’t Someone Think Of The Women?
Birds Like Us by Tammy Heejae Lee / Artwork by Hyun Jung Ahn
“Once she had buried Rachel, Grace tore the birdcage apart. She took down the beaded strings, the lattice balls, and the colorful swing she had strategically placed around their nest before. She had smashed the walls of the cage down and dumped them into their garbage can outside, along with several unopened bags of seed mixture. Grace had hurled the yellow chick plushie Appa had gotten her at the Japanese supermarket into the bins too, for good measure. It poked out of the overflowing trash can ever so slightly, looking like a pair of innocent eyes that peeked at anyone who walked past it on the sidewalk….”
Read Birds Like Us.
El Palomero by Lorena Hernández Leonard / Artwork by Farangiz Yusupova
“I can’t say that any of us saw our pigeon coop as a home. Whenever he could, Papi traded life at home with his wife and three daughters for the freedom of bachelorhood, spending most of his days out with friends and his many rumored lovers. As for my mother, she became my grandparents’ caretaker; never mind that she wasn’t blood-related to them. Her days were tied up at their place—cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and acting as Papito Martín’s personal nurse, administering his daily shot of insulin and tossing the cookies he used to hide in his night stand. All the while, me and my sister spent most of our time playing out on the streets when we weren’t in school….”
Read El Palomero.
Khôra will be back next month.
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