Issue 23: A Gesture of Silence | If Icarus Was a Drone | I Thought You Loved Me
"I could look life squarely only in art, in retrospect, from a distance. I could not stand on the hot tin roof of life. I hovered at its periphery, a scrawny and brown-limbed ten-year-old."
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
In Issue 23, we’re back with brilliant new work from our curated team of writers Bec Bell-Gurwitz, Anuradha Prasad, Anna Reeser, and Dey Rivers; and artists Liz Asch, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Fid Thompson, and Jordan Tierney. Scroll down to see the highlights.
We’re excited to share the work of Featured Artist and Writer MariNaomi (they/them), an award-winning author and illustrator of many books, including the recently released I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press). MariNaomi’s comics and paintings have been featured in the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American National Museum.
MariNaomi says of their process:
I’ve been making comics for more than 26 years, so the language of sequential art is what I feel I’m most fluent in. Collage is something I’ve dabbled with over the years, and it felt time to use it narratively, given the access digital art has given me over the past several years.
Each book I’ve made has a different process, so there is no one way. This keeps it interesting for me, and truly, the work decides how I will express it. Sometimes I start with a script, sometimes just a general idea. I Thought You Loved Me was begun on sticky notes on cork boards, where I wrote down memories and ideas and pieced them together like a puzzle. This is the first book I went into without knowing what I wanted to outcome to look like…
Issue 23’s Featured Writer Jesse Sorrell lives in Durham, NC and writes what he hears being shared between the elements. He practices spiritual care in pediatric hospice/palliative care and in other therapeutic settings. He loves living with and learning from his cat, Milo.
From A Gesture of Silence:
The small silences are everything.
Nothing but silence,
this breath.
This inhaling of life,
this mouthing open a crisp apple.Everything is to be known.
All the roads cross each other
where one known ends yet to begin
so stay close to your breath and bones.
Nothing is large under the silence of stars…
Check out Issue 23’s highlights below.
Artists and Writers! To enter Khôra’s collaborative waters:
Writers, read about Khôra’s 500 Words here.
Artists, send your artwork to Khôra's Images here.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
Issue 23 Highlights
Old Nights by Anuradha Prasad | Artwork by Christine Shan Shan Hou
Sleep came easily in those days. Sleep was a soothing, heavy balm. Waking up from it, my body was silken, warm, stretchy, dreams a faraway jostle of night memory. My body was child.
The night, like so many things, frightened me and I readily and without question closed my eyes to it. I learned early that night is to be shut out. Night is danger. Night is the realm of the unseen, the ones trampled in the light of day. Night is the head of a crow, hard-beaked and velvet-feathered…
Read Old Nights.
Summer Song II by Anna Reeser | Artwork by Liz Asch
The ultrasound burrows into memory like an old smell I can’t name. What is the smell of fullness in the throat? Or cereal left in milk too long, the O’s blurry at the edges? The walls of the clinic are papered with salmon-colored florals. I am aware of our dumb outfits—Aaron in a Sex Pistols shirt, me in a thrifted gingham sundress.
A nurse calls, “Catherine?”
We are led cheerfully into a dark room. The paper on the examination bench crunches under my hips. Lighthearted warning about the cold gel on the wand, and I feel it, dull and freezing. I watch a projected image with gray shapes. The wand presses my skin, searching. The image shifts—a grainy texture like pavement. Time slows, gets heavy, and I become aware of the bigness of this, the first glimpse of the future. Nina said my art is going to change. When? Is it now? Is the change bad or good? Aren’t we supposed to hear a sound? I hear Aaron breathing in and in and in…
Read Summer Song II.
If Icarus Was a Drone by Bec Bell-Gurwitz | Artwork by Jordan Tierney
I.
Under the paper sky,
rain was reliable but when my tongue reaches out
there is little relief
I am thirsty,
wanting to cry out
but there is no waterwe have been in drought for long enough
I read it in the news but didn't really believe it
until there was none left for me—every mouth suckles up to the sky.
Read If Icarus Was a Drone.
Crisis in Perfect Weather by Dey Rivers | Artwork by Fid Thompson
What is “the Before”?
Let’s peer into the ties and threads which led us here
Out here in the field under the elements assailing us, we work. We work and are not filled. We work and bend and work and estrange our muscles and lose our bones, our skin and are not filled. We see day by day the sunup, the sundown and cannot rest, are forced to not rest and are not filled. We stifle vibrations of our laughter by running away or sticking our head in a barrel, quiet the strength of our voice, dampen our wails and sobs, and are not filled.
We carry this with us.
Read Crisis in Perfect Weather.
Khôra will be back next month!
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