KHÔRA's Pride Issue is here 🏳️🌈 | Orion by LJ Jensen
"It’s been years since top surgery, and my chest is still numb. The nerve endings never healed. I picture the skin outside my heart woven together with fraying fibers, twisted and unkempt..."
In this edition:
KHÔRA’s Pride Issue is here ✨
Orion by LJ Jensen
Issue 52 Pride Issue Highlights
Call for Submissions | Special Summer Editions: HEAT and FLASH
Welcome to KHÔRA’s Pride Issue, a celebration of queer life in all its strength and beauty.
I'm incredibly proud of this issue — both as the Editor and as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. This year's Pride Issue contains 6 very different pieces that shine with queer joy, resilience, and love.
In this issue, you’ll read LJ Jensen’s account of life after surgery, “a body stuck in the moment of anticipation before a desire is fulfilled.” I was thrilled to receive a gorgeous photo essay from Valerie Reding — a choreographer-photographer’s love letter to the aliveness of drag. (Their work is this month’s cover.) I invite you to linger over Zoë Fay-Stindt’s luscious poem, which I won’t describe because it would detract from its wonder. You’ll also find three short essays from Ed Wolf, a writer who spent nearly four decades at the front lines of the AIDS/HIV epidemic — a testament to presence as a form of devotion. Arya Samuelson’s short story reads like a meditation on learning to trust what love is offering you; and finally, Sharon Pink’s soaring essay about riding with Dykes on Bikes in the Vancouver Pride Parade.
If you sent us something for the Pride Issue and didn’t hear back, please remember that you won’t ever receive a notice of rejection from KHÔRA. Your words will always remain active in our ocean. We wish to stay open to the possibility that at any point, your work will be a fit for a curated issue or team collaboration. In fact, we often review work several times before deciding where a piece fits, and sometimes it can be years later when something stands out as the missing piece in a particular issue. Every issue is intended to be a conversation.
Help us celebrate and share this issue with the people you love.
🏳️🌈 Happy Pride!
Leigh
Leigh Hopkins
Editor and Curator, KHÔRA
P.S. There’s still time to send us your work for the upcoming HEAT and FLASH Issues. Details below.
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.
Orion by LJ Jensen
It’s been years since top surgery, and my chest is still numb. The nerve endings never healed. I picture the skin outside my heart woven together with fraying fibers, twisted and unkempt. I can sense pressure, but all else disappears on contact. A red hot shower, an over-washed band t-shirt, the chipped edge of a coffee mug balanced on my chest while turning the page of a book. My own hands—it all turns to sand, swept clean in the presence of my skin.
Before the surgery, a trans friend instructed me to stand in the mirror for a few minutes every day once the bandages came off.
“Touch every part of your chest and watch,” he said.
He instructed me to dictate my movements while looking at my reflection. Now I am touching the skin below my collarbone. Now I am touching my sternum. This, he told me, would help my brain start to recognize my body again. When I was finally free of the compression binders and surgical tape, the drains and stitches, I tried the technique only once. I couldn’t watch my fingers as they brushed my body with no sensation on the other side. It was an unrequited love between hands and skin, a call with no answer….
LJ Jensen is a non-fiction writer. Their essays can be found in The Rumpus, Catapult, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. They are an alum of Kenyon Writers Workshop and McCormack Oregon Summer Workshop (formerly Tin House), and a recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Millay Arts, and Nes Artist Residency in Iceland. They live in Brooklyn, NY with their dog.
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
⚡ 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: Monday, August 10, 2026
How it works:
Submissions for this series are open now and close August 7, 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.
About our transition
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