Issue 9: The Waves Hear Every Promise You've Made | Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them | Connective Tissue
It was barely a fraction of a second, but a fear had gotten through—something primal and wild.
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
In Issue 9, Khôra is back with a brilliant new team of four writers and four artists. This collaborative team of eight will work together on Issues 9 - 12, and we’re excited for you to meet them.
Issue 9’s featured writer is Chloe Clark, the author of Collective Gravities, Your Strange Fortune, and more. Her forthcoming books include Escaping the Body and Every Song a Vengeance. In The Waves Hear Every Promise You’ve Made, a renowned limnologist is called to investigate a strange occurrence at a lake from her past:
“Someone found a pile of bones washed ashore. Like a whole pile. Some animal bones, maybe some human.”
Chloe Clark’s artful, eerie short story is paired with two of her own photographs of Lake Superior.
Featured artist Colleen Keefe (they/them) is a visual artist, writer and curator based in Philadelphia. Keefe says of their current body of work: “For a long time my work has explored methods for breeding urban environments using organic models—multicellular organisms’ reproductive and propulsion strategies, pollination methods employed by plants, or stellar birth…more recently I've been experimenting with gestural work and writing. Untitled 2020.1 is part of a series of smaller gestural, meditative works on Yupo paper.”
In addition to their studio practice, Keefe has been curating since 1995—first, as co-director of 57 Hope in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY (1995-2001)—and currently as co-director of Mount Airy Contemporary (2009-present).
It’s exciting to watch an issue come together, and in this one, I was taken surprise by the synergy of several distinct meditations on the stars. If you love what you’re reading and seeing, please share, tweet, retweet, comment, and post. Khôra will be back with a new issue next month.
Yours,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
Issue 9 Highlights
The Waves Hear Every Promise You’ve Made by Featured Writer Chloe Clark
“The stretch of road that snakes between land and Lake Superior was always shifting between sight and secrets—that’s how Kara’s son had described it, when he was young, on one of their long drives up to the cabin, and it had stuck in her head ever since. She thought of it again as she broke free from the darkness of a tunnel and the lake was suddenly there beside her. It shimmered under the sun, all light and vastness…”
Read The Waves Hear Every Promise You’ve Made.
Above All Was the Sense of Hearing Acute by Sabrina Tom / Artwork by Soumya Netrabile
“I know—I am difficult to read. My resting expression is placid, the most mysterious. They tell me my eyes are especially plain. Two bowls of brown rice—nothing in them. And yet my feelings are far from simple. My soul, too, is heavy with emotion. So do not presume that I am crazy, for a crazy woman could not feel as I did. Could not see and hear as I did. Could not kill as I did…”
Read Above All Was the Sense of Hearing Acute.
Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them by Ploi Pirapokin / Artwork by Fay Ku
“Part I of IV
2021.
Lily’s number flashed across my phone screen before I could finish my morning espresso. I thought she wanted to complain about her good-for-nothing Dan, who left wet clothes in the washer overnight again and now all their shirts smelled like mushrooms. Dan, who averts eye contact and ignores answering the question of whether they should have children or not, as Lily’s uterus simmered for the past ten years. Sliding into my chair, I practiced regurgitating supportive phrases like, “He’s being very Dan,” before answering….”
Read Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them.
Sand Dollar by Adam Swanson / Artwork by Jen Fuller
“He lured me with sand dollars. Or maybe just those two words: Sand dollar. Sand dollar. Sand dollar. From a little wicker basket, his teenage fingers would place sand dollars into my small hands. My fingers would carefully explore each delicate piece, their little pores and divots all round and white and dead, while he told me stories about sand dollars and the sea and the sounds of seagulls. I thought sand dollars were real money—money so rare they were never seen in stores because they came from nature. How much is a sand dollar worth—I wondered with big eyes—how many green dollars for a sand dollar? I was the only daycare kid he invited to touch his sand dollars or look at his other sea treasures…”
Read Sand Dollar.
Connective Tissue by Carol Fischbach / Artwork by Helen Blake
“September 11, 2001
1. In the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, in Horsetooth Mountain Park, a bird on a branch faces a burning ball in the east, the one that brings light every day over the high plains nestled against the foothills. The shafts of the bird’s long iridescent blue and black tail feathers twitch, white breast feathers tense against her body, glowing blue-green feathered wings tuck tight, all her feathers pulled in to protect the ripple of thin epidermal skin beneath. Her throat wants to release a raspy cawcaw but something stops her...”
Read Connective Tissue.
Untitled 2020.1 by Featured Artist Colleen Keefe
“For a long time my work has explored methods for breeding urban environments using organic models—multicellular organisms’ reproductive and propulsion strategies, pollination methods employed by plants, or stellar birth. The resulting images depict cities grown organically, without an ‘urban planner’ as protagonist, based on environmental conditions and observing ‘natural’ rules that are internally consistent—a closed set describing the universe they inhabit. These ‘city organisms’ serve as stand-ins for any kind of naturally evolving phenomena—the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, our species, our society, our selves, and further down the macro/micro scale…”
Read Untitled 2020.1.
Khôra will be back next month.
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