Issue 38: A Bridge is a Place by Marina Gross-Hoy
"I was not here when Notre-Dame burned. I had already moved to Montreal. In the last snows of winter, I watched the flames lick her spire from a laptop as my own body was consumed by fires..."
A Bridge is a Place | by Marina Gross-Hoy
Her novel, [Gordimer] implies, takes place in what Gramsci calls the ‘interregnum,’ the chaotic middle period between what is dying and what is new and as yet unimaginable. — At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present, Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord, 2017
I sink onto the freezing stone of a curved ledge carved into the Pont Neuf and look out over the morning river. The cold from the bridge easily sneaks through my black wool coat and black tights and black cotton dress, all the layers of my Parisian uniform, black black black. I slide gloved hands under my icy hips, trying to stop the chill from creeping up my spine. I refuse to be shooed off this bridge by a little bit of nippiness. A few days ago, I was stretching ice cleats over the bottoms of my boots to go for a forest walk in three feet of Quebec snow. Now I am in a land of ripening magnolia buds. There’s been some glitch in the timeline, skipping me past the lingering of winter.
I will not go back to the restrictions of freeze.
I wrap my flimsy linen scarf in one more loop around my neck and stay where I am. A moment of mindfulness should get this day on the rails. The surface of the river flowing below me is glassy like an old mirror, with the colors of the stone quais bleeding into its edges like watercolor paints. I can’t see Notre-Dame on the island in the middle of the bridge, but I know Our Lady of Paris is still there behind the mass of conjoined buildings, veiled under scaffolding, backlit from the low morning sun preparing to rise behind her….
Read more from A Bridge is a Place.
Marina Gross-Hoy is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in the Eastern Townships of Québec. She is completing a Museum Studies PhD dissertation at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the development of digital interpretation projects for visitors. She holds degrees in History of Art from the University of Michigan and muséologie from the École du Louvre in Paris. Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to embodied experience. By subverting the gaze honed through looking at art in museums and turning it onto the ordinary and natural world, her essays explore how engaging with life through this 'museum gaze' can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment.
Issue 38 Highlights
Issue 38: Les combattants by Featured Artist Ousmane Bâ
Issue 38: dear Coral Grief by nawa angel a.h.
Issue 38: the void by Michael Nagle | Artwork by Kirk Read
Issue 38: Festival of Love by Mayur Chauhan
Issue 38: A Bridge is a Place by Marina Gross-Hoy
Issue 38: Everyday Apocalypses by Featured Writer A.B. Lim
Artists and Writers
We’re looking for features! 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.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and KHÔRA will be back soon with Issue 39.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad
yes marina!
🤌🏾🤌🏾 👏🏾👏🏾