KHÔRA's Pride Issue 🏳️🌈 | All That Distance, Still Arriving by Arya Samuelson
To be in bed with the woman you love at five in the afternoon, five-thirty, six. To become the Milky Way, shuddering, smeared with stars. Contained, yet always expanding. Are there sounds in outer...
In this edition:
All That Distance, Still Arriving by Arya Samuelson
Issue 52 Pride Issue Highlights
Call for Submissions | Special Summer Editions: HEAT and FLASH
There’s still time to send us your work for the upcoming HEAT and FLASH Issues.
The deadline for HEAT is tomorrow, June 29, 2026. Details below.
All That Distance, Still Arriving by Arya Samuelson
We are in bed at four in the afternoon: me, Hannah, and her dog Polly. I am so in love with Hannah that it hurts — hurts that I cannot feel Hannah’s skin because her dog has draped herself onto Hannah’s body, barricading the two of us, but even more than that, it hurts that Hannah is actually trying to sleep right now, which is the last thing that I feel like doing. To ward against further hurts, I sit propped up against pillows, poised with my magazine and read. I laugh, both because it’s occasionally funny, and also because I’m hoping that Hannah will wake up and want to know why. “Shhhh,” she rebukes me.
Earlier that day Hannah and I were at the botanic garden, surrounded by the fanned spikes of the coccothrinex crinita, the seaweed fingers of phoenix roebelani, huge hovering banana plants. My lips grazed Hannah’s papery blouse as we sat together on the bench, marijuana from the vape in Hannah’s pocket humming inside us as if she could recognize her fellow plant comrades from dreams. We sat quietly for a long time, surrounded by that family of green, its happy hunger.
Quiet except when I worried that Hannah might be getting bored, so I commanded her eyesight towards something that would keep her here with me. Quiet except when Hannah noticed something far more interesting, something I’d completely missed, like how the undersides of the banana leaves were printed with facts about colonization and faceless corporations, and I wished I could borrow her painter’s eyes — astute, always wide-open — to see the world like she does, not only because it would turn my world less myopic, but also because then I would never have to worry about what she was actually looking at, what she was actually thinking, and maybe then I would finally stop worrying about whether she was going to leave me….
Read All That Distance, Still Arriving.
Arya Samuelson is a writer, editor, educator, and somatic practitioner in Western Massachusetts. She is the winner of New Ohio Review’s Nonfiction Prize, Lascaux Review’s Nonfiction Prize, and CutBank’s Montana Prize in Nonfiction awarded by Cheryl Strayed. Her essay, “I Am No Beekeeper” was selected as Notable in Best American Essays 2024. Other essays and stories have been published in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, Columbia Journal, Gertrude, and elsewhere. Arya holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and her work has received support from Marble House, Ragdale, Monson Arts, Mass Cultural Council, Edith Wharton/Straw Dog Guild, Virginia Creative Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Arya teaches and works as a developmental editor and creative coach to help writers unearth the deeper story. She is currently writing a memoir, a novel, and a book of essays.
Issue 52 Pride Special Issue Highlights
This summer, we’re returning to a favorite seasonal series: three themed Summer Special Editions, each shaped around a single word. There are two remaining calls:
🔥 JULY — HEAT
We’re looking for feverish, sweat-soaked, summer-scorched writing and art that simmer and ignite. Longing, pressure, combustion. Emotional heat. Erotic heat. Literal heat. Climate heat. Kink. We want to feel the burn.
Deadline: Monday, June 29, 2026
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⚡ AUGUST — FLASH
Send us your shortest writing—fiction, micro-essays, poetry, fragments, dispatches. We’re talking itty-bitty, under 500 words. This is open to writers only, but we do encourage you to include links to your own artwork if you’re multi-talented like that.
Deadline: Friday, August 10, 2026
How it works:
Submissions for this series are open now and close August 10, 2026.
We welcome emerging and established voices—poetry, short prose (maximum 2K), hybrid forms, visual art, and unclassifiable experiments.
Submit up to 3 pieces per theme.
In your note, please mention the name of the issue the work is intended for: Pride, Heat, Flash.
Word count of 2K or under for Pride and Heat, maximum 500 words for Flash.
Previously unpublished work only, please. Simultaneous submissions are fine—just keep us in the loop if your piece has been accepted by another publication when we reach out.
We have a strict no-AI policy for all submissions.
Leigh Hopkins is the Editor and Curator of KHÔRA and the Founder and Director of Viva Institute, an educational platform advancing creativity, consciousness, and collective repair.
 | A guest post by
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I was breathless. Loved the fire consumption.