Issue 33 is live! | Issue Highlights + "postpartum: three poems" by Mia Sitterson
"Baby toes trap lint like nobody’s business, nails grow faster than you can fall asleep, once you finally get the chance, and day is night and night is day, and time unravels still."
Welcome to KHÔRA, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you’d like your work to be considered for future issues.
Issue 33 Highlights
Welcome to Issue 33, with Self-Untitled, an intimate photo series by this month’s Featured Artist Sam Geballe; postpartum: three poems by Featured Writer, postpartum doula and lactation counselor Mia Sitterson; and four new pieces by our curated teams: writers Melissa Leto, Jesse Sorrell, Deborah Stein, Swati Sudarsan; and artists Sorcha McNamara, Michel O’Hara, and Sally Rifkin. This issue is a stunner!
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postpartum: three poems by Mia Sitterson | artwork by Sally Rifkin
1
The newborn sleeps through coffee grinder and vacuum, because the inside of a uterus is a train station under water, all thrum and whoosh and beat and rumble. Nine months is long enough to hang art on the walls and justify the nail holes. Long enough to know: I live here, this is mine, this is home.
When our world is still and quiet, the baby thrashes and cries. Closes its eyes to open its mouth, stretches its hands to the sky. Give me chaos, it seems to say. Rock me, swing me. Bring your mouth to my small ear and convince me you are the sea. If it is loud, it is home.
When does that change? When do we begin to crave stillness? When do we retreat? When does the world become too loud?
Read postpartum: three poems on KHÔRA.
Mia Sitterson spends her days supporting families as a postpartum doula & lactation counselor, and her evenings processing her emotions through dance & poetry. A good day is one in which she gets to bask in the sun, rock a baby to sleep, and shimmy. Her poetry, and everything else in her life, begins in her (queer, Jewish, Cuban-American) body, often as a dance. For the last four years, she has hosted a bi-monthly queer poetry group at her home in Washington, DC. Over a hundred people have written poems in this space.
Sally Rifkin is a queer, multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Primarily utilizing the medium of collage, her work investigates how places take on meaning through memory, nostalgia, identity, and experiences, addressing the question: how do we create the communities we want without repeating the mistakes of the past? By recontextualizing found materials, she creates visual juxtapositions that seek to highlight disjunctures and suggest unexpected affinities.
ICYMI: Issue 32 Highlights
Issue 32: Meet the new curated team | Featured Artist Charles Ritchie
Issue 32: Part 1: Meet Nadine | by Swati Sudarsan photograph by Michel O’Hara
Issue 32: Air | poem by Jesse Sorrell | sculpture by Sorcha McNamara
Issue 32: Four Portraits + Violet, A Story in Words and Pictures by Deborah Stein
Call for Artists
We’re looking for features and our future teams! For upcoming issues, we’re especially on the lookout for new featured artists. If you are a visual artist and you’re interested in sharing your artwork or images, send links to your artwork to KHÔRA's Images here.
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With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad