Issue 36 Summer Special Edition: Strawberry Lipgloss | Marisa Cadena
"It’s been over twenty years now and with each passing year, the beginning of the story changes. New smells, sounds, and breezes emerge. Others get lost. Voices change and sunny days become cloudy."
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 36: Summer Special Edition
A note from the Editor/Curator:
Welcome to Issue 36, KHÔRA’s Summer Special Edition. This issue features pieces that were sent to us through KHÔRA’s 500 Words. As we’ve shared before, once you send us your work, you words will remain active in KHÔRA’s ocean. Why? We’re interested in the way pieces work together; the way they create a conversation. In Issue 36, you’ll find essays, short stories, and poems about summer love, desire, lost love, missed connections, and finding love in unexpected places.
Today’s love bite is an essay by Marisa Cadena. Marisa’s words appear in New World Writing, Eclectica, Elizabeth Ellen’s Hobart, and Babes of the Abyss, a book on the artwork of A.J. Springer. She is currently seeking representation for her memoir about her experience as a light-skinned Mexican American moving alone to Mexico at nineteen. Her cocktail recipes are featured in New York Magazine, Health Magazine, and a few books and websites. Marisa is a producer and co-host of People at the Core Podcast and The Palace Reading Series in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she lives with her perfect pup and husband.
Check out the full Issue 36 Summer Special Edition, and if you missed our previous issues, visit our Archive. If you’d like to be considered for future publications, scroll down to learn more about KHÔRA’s 500 Words and KHÔRA’s Images.
Big love,
Leigh
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad
Strawberry Lipgloss by Marisa Cadena
It’s been over twenty years now and with each passing year, the beginning of the story changes. New smells, sounds, and breezes emerge. Others get lost. Voices change and sunny days become cloudy. I had forgotten that one afternoon, when he met me at school and we walked to the zócalo, getting caught in a torrential summer downpour that soaked us to our underwear. My pale blue skirt, transparent and clinging to my thighs. How could I have forgotten that day?
We sought refuge in a Mediterranean restaurant we frequented, oddly enough, for their french fries. After the rain had subsided, we sat on the curb and pointed to objects in the street; he tested my Spanish vocabulary; and I—his English. I had never needed to know what a llanta was before; I had only been driving for six months. He struggled pronouncing the “th” in “birthday”—inspired by a card in a shop window. “Burtday,” he would say over and over, bringing us to full belly laughs at his every attempt. I recently found the photograph that proved it really happened, inside my memorabilia chest, tucked in with the piles of letters he had sent over the three years we were apart. I have fuzzy memories of me, sixteen or seventeen, sitting at my desk with an English-Spanish dictionary in hand, searching for the perfect word, feeling self-conscious over my conjugation and grammar (I still do). And it was he who taught me, unintentionally, that I wasn’t Mexican. Or rather, not the kind I thought I was. For the first time, I began questioning my Mexican card-holding status which meant one thing in Michigan and another in Mexico. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it….
Read Strawberry Lipgloss.
Issue 36 Highlights
Issue 36 Special Edition: Strawberry Lipgloss
Issue 36 Special Edition: Lost in Midtown
Issue 36 Special Edition: Olympia Billiards
Issue 36 Special Edition: Gut Feeling
Issue 36 Special Edition: Mother-In-Law
Issue 36 Special Edition: Please Leave A Message
Artists and Writers
We’re looking for features and our future teams! To enter KHÔRA’s collaborative waters:
Writers, read about KHÔRA’s 500 Words here.
Artists, send your artwork to KHÔRA's Images here.
Team-based, collaborative, and curated, KHÔRA is a form that is continually opening. We invite you to join us in sustaining it together. We don't believe in rejections. KHÔRA’s 500 Words is about considering how multiple voices can be heard; how frameworks, traditions, and projects can inform each other; and how new perspectives emerge from collaboration and openness. If you are a visual artist or interested in sharing your artwork or images, ready about KHÔRA’s Images here.
Your words/images will always remain active in KHÔRA’s ocean, and you won’t ever receive a notice of rejection from us. We know this process is not perfect; we wish to stay open to the possibility that at any point, your work will be a fit for a curated issue or team collaboration. This doesn’t need to be a completed piece—think of it like a sample of your work at any length up to 500 words.
Once you send 500 Words, your work will remain in our inclusive and expansive space. You can send 500 Words more than once—there’s no limit to how many times you can send us new work; just no repeats, please. KHÔRA doesn’t publish previously published work, but feel free to share any 500 words you want as a sample (published or unpublished).
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, and post, and KHÔRA will be back soon.