Issue 37: to buwaya baby | by nawa a.h.
Dear Buwaya baby, Even a land can be jealous. Even a volcano can get sick of its own disruptions. It’s easy to find the fault lines. Pointed blame is just that. I’d never blame you, buwaya....
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.
to buwaya baby by nawa a.h.
It is not usual for Buu to be clammy. Reptilian? Yes. Cool, wet, blood comes with being so close to a volcano’s tricuspid valve. Buu’s own heart tends to fuck shit up. She’s too hot to touch, but devastatingly entrancing, like a candle pooling wax towards the center flame. Part of you wants to touch it, to cast two fingerprints in a goop’d surrender, even if it means risking getting singed in the end.
A butterfly lands under the salt wet of Buu’s eyes. Buu calls it eye sweat. She doesn’t bother to wipe them away. There’s a client on the other side of the vintage rotary phone landline; he isn’t afraid of missing her. Buu misses something too, longing spills over in a misplaced way.
Don’t you miss me, Mami?
OVER THE PHONE BUU BECOMES —
She replies covering her own loneliness, a dangerous state if ever caught by a voyeur — too much relatability is a liability. Buu’s breath creates condensation on the phone receiver. It dribbles down the spiraling phone chord. Her finger spirals her hair, where her brain spirals hard enough to change the shape of her sulcus. The grooves furrow. The eye brow furrows. The heart burrows. It’s a dollar for every sixty seconds that passes and Typhoon Gaemi is fifteen minutes away. Risqué is foolish, but it pays the bills. Dead or alive. Buu oscillates between the two; her tongue rolls in and out like a party kazoo.
Tell me what you look like…
Read to buwaya baby.
nawa a.h. (widely known as Moonyeka) is a chimeric creator working across containers of performance, qt nightlife, digital art, experimental media and the divine. They're a settler fluttering between Chumash, Chinook, and Duwamish lands. Within their mixed-diasporic-bakla embodiment, Moonyeka creates experiences of queer erotic joy, animism, Ilocano imagination, and beyond. Their collaborative processes center kapwa, maarte, and kilig as a compass to imagine thriving worlds for their communities. i was never the siren (2024) is a film re-myth of the Siren archetype; the first installment of their multimedia project 'Harana for the Aswang' realized with House of Kilig collaborators. nawa draws upon queer and trans performance technologies in their writing, infusing nightlife, states of con-myth-legend, drag, tease, and kink. You can find them frolicking in a spectrum of writing fields such as biomythography, hybrid-wtfness, and the game writing industry. They were recently published with their multiverse of work centering Waling-Waling Orchids in smoke and mold. am i hot enough to kill?, an excerpt of (w)horrific hybrid prose, is featured in The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press.
Heidi Grace Acuña (HGA/they/she) is an artist who “creates to live” for their mental health, for their communities, and to honor their ancestral calling. Born in Federal Way, Washington to immigrant Ilokano-Filipino parents, and raised on O‘ahu since one year old, Heidi felt disconnected to a true sense of home and belonging. Now, Heidi makes art that finds the beauty in the multiplicities, imperfections, and expansiveness of identity, culture, gender, and home. Heidi’s dimensional work in ceramic sculpture, textiles, painting, illustration, printmaking, and photography reveal anxiously curious, and deep investigations of universal human experiences, which are inspired by the diverse tropical colors of her island homes, living in diaspora, and the need for connection.
Issue 37 Highlights
We’re thrilled to introduce the newest members of our curated team: writers nawa a.h., Mayur Chauhan, Marina Gross-Hoy, and Michael Nagle; artists Heidi Grace Acuña and Kirk Read; and Featured Writer Christina Berke and Featured Artist Ro Stasny. Check out Issue 37 here, and if you missed our previous issues, visit our Archive.
Issue 37: The Minotaur by Michael Nagle | Artwork by Kirk Read
Issue 37: Stranger Technologies by Marina Gross-Hoy
Issue 37: to buwaya baby by nawa a.h. | Artwork by Heidi Grace Acuña
Issue 37: A Little Bit of Everything by Mayur Chauhan
Issue 37: a good egg by Featured Writer Christina Berke
Issue 37: hive forest by Featured Artist Ro Stastny
Artists and Writers
We’re looking for features! If you’d like to be considered for future publications, click below to enter KHÔRA’s collaborative waters:
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.
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With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad
yayyy!!
The best!! 😘🐊💕😘🐊💕