Issue 15: From Dust to Pulse | My Aunt Tells Me I’m Not Getting Any Younger | Exit Strategy
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 15’s Featured artist Yohana Oizumi is a Brazilian visual artist who lives and works in São Paulo. She says of her work:
“Performance permeates all my reflection and work experience, which influences my drawings, photographs, installations, and sculptures. Deconstructing and rebuilding are the main guidelines that move my artistic practice, in a clash with clay, metal, glass, wood, and other materials. I evoke what I consider sacred and subversive to elucidate the release of the body to the exhaustion and transformation of what I intend to honor, risk, and ritualize.”
View From Dust to Pulse.
Issue 15’s Featured writer Lynne Schmidt is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and a mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. They are the winner of the 2021 The Poetry Question Chapbook Award for their chapbook, Sexytime, and the 2020 New Women's Voices Contest for their chapbook, Dead Dog Poems.
Lynne says of their poem, My Aunt Tells Me I'm Not Getting Any Younger: "recently I’ve been going back through my aunt's death in January and exploring what it meant to lose her, and what it meant to lose her from a pandemic level virus, only a few months following my uncle's death from cancer. This new work aims to encompass how complicated family relationships can be."
She worries that I will die alone,
and I tell her I worry
if I settle for something other than
exactly what I want,
I will die unhappy.
She huffs and smokes a cigarette
because I am a lost cause.
Read My Aunt Tells Me I'm Not Getting Any Younger.
In Issue 15, we’re back with exciting new work from our 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.
Check out the highlights below.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
Big love,
Leigh
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
Issue 15 Highlights
Exit Strategy by Tammy Heejae Lee / Artwork by Tyler James Bangkok
“She could always fake someone’s death.
It was a ludicrous idea, but one Pearl held onto as a comforting thought. She desperately needed to quit her job, but Pearl had never quit a job before and she was afraid of how her boss would react. At least a fictional death would give her an excuse to leave with absolutely no strings attached, a way out without needing much of an explanation. It was a last resort, albeit a terrible one, but every time Pearl found herself dreading her boss’ text messages constantly lighting up her phone screen or taking Uber after Uber around the city to do his every bidding, she calmed herself down with the assurance that all it would take to be rid of him forever was a well-crafted lie.”
Ordinary Softness by Amy Estes / Artwork by Hyun Jung Ahn
“When I was 22, I decided to take BART into San Francisco to wander the city on a brisk, fall Friday. This wasn’t just any Friday: it was the day my divorce was legally final, after six long months of waiting, and a year filled with anger and terror and the deepest sadness I’d ever known. I’d married the wrong person too young, and thankfully, I’d gotten out. I was both heartbroken and relieved that it was over.
I told everyone I was going to San Francisco to celebrate, but really, I was desperate to be lonely in a different city—a place that didn’t feel haunted by what I thought my life should be. I was angry all the time, and I’d started telling anyone who would listen that love didn’t exist, or that if it did, I didn’t want anything to do with it…”
The Witching Hour by Lorena Hernández Leonard / Artwork by Theano Giannezi
“While I’ve carried my grandfather’s stories close to me over the years, the story that has had the biggest impact in my life was told by an old woman who lived alone in a big farmhouse about a mile away from tío John’s place.
One evening, my uncle took us to visit his elderly neighbor. With flashlights in hand, the adults illuminated the doughy clay path in front of us. Not much could be seen. The darkness of the skies dotted with stars, the coolness in the air, and the sounds of the many animals that lurked in the thickness of the trees and shrubs set the stage for a fable-like adventure…”
Thus Spake Hala Alyan by Bazeed / Artwork by Farangiz Yusupova
“In this land of American shrapnel
Everything haunts.
I point out the dead things I found in the night sky.
I keep the seventeen houses.
I keep the baby teeth.
In this land of American shrapnel
Everything haunts &
the worst ghosts are the ones that don’t come back….”
Khôra will be back next month.
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