Issue 44: (This is how you) Lose Her by Christina Berke | Artwork by April Dauscha
This is how—the sponsored makeup reels and tummy teas and popular pills and needles and lasers and Kim K and Before-and-Afters, these bodies that don’t that won’t that can’t look like hers. So take...
(This is how you) Lose Her by Christina Berke | Artwork by April Dauscha
You starve her then hunger finds her again and again so you give in and feed her, tummy tight as a drum, sick with sugar and sand until guilt balloons up once more. So there she is in the mirror, a dirty sad thing, alone and quiet. You lose her again—this is how. Over and over. And this is how—with 100 calorie packs and pre-packaged meals and frozen dinners made in a windowless lab by lithe limbs, microwaved in plastic trays, leaching microtoxins into three symmetrical, portioned globes of meat. You lose her with each hateful bite, each hunger pang, every muscle burning with fatigue. This is how—the sponsored makeup reels and tummy teas and popular pills and needles and lasers and Kim K and Before-and-Afters, these bodies that don’t that won’t that can’t look like hers….
Read (This is how you) Lose Her.
Christina Berke is a Chilean-American writer based in Los Angeles. She’s been supported by Tin House, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, Storyknife and elsewhere. Her memoir, Well, Body, was Longlisted with Disquiet Literary International.
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, April Dauscha received her BFA in fashion design at the International Academy of Design and Technology and her MFA in fiber from Virginia Commonwealth University. April has served on the board of directors for the Surface Design Association (SDA) and is one of the founding members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL). She has been represented by Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and her work has been featured in Vogue Portugal. She has exhibited her work nationally, at the Fuller Craft Museum, MANA Contemporary, and Tracey Morgan Gallery, and internationally in Berlin, Cape Town, Jerusalem, and Belgrade. She is currently heading the fiber arts program at the Fine Arts Center, a performing and visual arts high school, in Greenville, South Carolina.
Issue 44 Highlights
Issue 44: Behind the Marks by Featured Artist Nicole Roberts
Issue 44: The Progressive Filtering of Truth by Featured Writer Jenny Tang
Issue 44: How To Gigil by Ella deCastro Baron | Artwork by Vex Kaztro
Issue 44: Wander Yonder by Isra Hassan | Artwork by fanjoy labrenz
Issue 44: The Witch of Khawaneej by Raja’a Khalid | Artwork by Kate Molloy
Issue 44: (This is how you) Lose Her by Christina Berke | Artwork by April Dauscha
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 more from Issue 44.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad