KHÔRA's Pride Issue is here — ✨ Quarts Inverts by Pascal Emmer | Smiling Ferocious Thing by Scott Nelson
This summer, we’re opening the doors to a seasonal series—three Summer Special Editions, each one shaped around a single word. This is an invitation to send us work that shimmers, lingers, glows....
In this edition:
KHÔRA's Pride Issue is here ✨
Quarts Inverts by Pascal Emmer
Smiling Ferocious Thing by Scott Nelson
Special Summer Editions: HEAT and FLASH
Introducing KHÔRA’s Pride Issue—a celebration of queer life in all its strength and beauty. These six pieces shine with queer joy, resilience, and love. Help us celebrate and share with the people you love.
If you sent us something for the Pride Issue and didn’t hear back, you won’t ever receive a notice of rejection from us. Your words will always remain active in KHÔRA's ocean. We know this process is not perfect—we are always rethinking and searching, and wish to stay open to the possibility that at any point, your work will be a fit for a curated issue or team-collaboration.
There’s still time to send us your work for the upcoming HEAT and FLASH Issues (details below).
Quarts Inverts by Pascal Emmer
This poem is after and for Ella DeCastro Baron, whose generous spirit of collaboration in Trans[...]missions & Transgressions crystallized this offering.
when they felled our bodies
with an ax of nine hundred edges
we became a petrified forestour arborescent forms fracturing
as they hit the floodwaters
we rioted
limbs breaking
we entered that ancient riverthey tried to bury us
not knowing
we were
time machinesthe river inserted a PICC line
in our heartwood
suffused it with silica…
Read Quarts Inverts.
Pascal Emmer is a trans, neuroqueer, multidisciplinary artist and writer living in O’Ga P’Ogeh Owingeh (Santa Fe, NM). Through collaborative design, participatory action research, and speculative fiction, they seek to create stories for a future otherwise. They are a researcher with the Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability and co-author of Unmasked: Impacts of Pandemic Policing, Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures, and This is a Prison, Glitter is Not Allowed: Experiences of Trans and Gender Variant People in Pennsylvania’s Prison Systems. They co-founded Hearts on a Wire, an organization that supports incarcerated trans people through art, poetry, and letters.
Smiling Ferocious Thing by Scott Nelson
Tonight I’m not organizing phone banks, or scrubbing ash from the Eaton Canyon Fire off my porch, or weighing hope against fear. I’m walking with you down a sketchy alley to the flickering-lighted door. The mountains behind us are burning. The planes above us are falling. I’m carrying a shoulder bag full of rope and sharp things, pointed smiles and promises. You’re dragging a roller suitcase full of electro gear and I’ve got an extension cord. You’re carrying the desire for experience. I’m carrying the need to be felt. We’re walking in bodies that could be stolen from us. Together, we shoulder the fear that we might not be alive in four years.
For the last six months, on every organizing Zoom meeting, the icebreaker question has been “What’s been bringing you joy—despite, you know, the increasing fascist hellscape we’re all trapped in?” And I’ve been saying “My cat,”—which isn’t wrong— but it’s this. It’s us. It’s you.
It’s the way your shoulder muscle reacts when I run the electro wand over the back of your neck. It’s you scream-laughing at me. It’s your whimpers, your ragged breathing, your hands balling into fists. Your cries ringing in my ears. It’s you shimmering with pleasure-pain. It’s your courage when you say, I want to hurt like this—and only like this. I want it right here, I want this much, for this long, give it to me now….
Read Smiling Ferocious Thing.
Scott Nelson (they/them, and trying on he/him although they still feel conflicted about claiming masculinity, but ever since they changed their name and decided to let their hairline go, they’re trying to get more comfortable with it) is a queer and trans writer based in Los Angeles. Their work has been featured in Brevity, Ninth Letter, Catapult, and elsewhere, and their novella, Have You Seen Me, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. Scott is writing a novel that’s an autistic comedy of manners about being gay and doing crime.
Issue 46 Pride Special Issue Highlights
Issue 46: Quarts Inverts by Pascal Emmer
Issue 46: Smiling Ferocious Thing by Scott Nelson
Issue 46: Walking home by Ed Wolf
Issue 46: Tomar kotha bhogoban ke bole eshechi by Mei Love
Issue 46: Boy in Grass by Joe Nasta
Issue 46: Under the Gameleira Tree by Melina Oliveira
Artists and Writers
This summer, we’re opening the doors to a seasonal series—two more Summer Special Editions, each one shaped around a single word. This is an invitation to send us work that shimmers, lingers, glows. Art that refuses to explain itself too quickly.
🔥 JULY — HEAT
Swelter, sizzle, burn. We looking for fever-dreamed, sweat-soaked, summer-scorched work that simmers and ignites. Literal heat. Emotional heat. Climate heat. Erotic heat. Longing, pressure, combustion. Bring us the burn.
⚡ AUGUST — FLASH
Micro. Sudden. Sharp. Send us your shortest work—fiction, micro-essays, poetry, fragments, dispatches. We’re talking itty-bitty, under 500 words. We’re listening for the echo.
How it works:
Submissions open today and close on August 1. To be considered for the HEAT Issue, please send your work no later than July 10. In your note, please mention the name of the issue the work is intended for (Heat, Flash).
Submit up to 3 pieces per theme.
Maximum 2K words for HEAT; maximum 500 words for FLASH.
Previously unpublished work only, please. Simultaneous submissions are fine—just keep us in the loop.
We welcome emerging and established voices—poetry, short prose (maximum 2K), hybrid forms, visual art, and unclassifiable experiments.
Surprise us. Seduce us. Leave something behind.
Can’t wait to see what you’ve got on the burner.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and KHÔRA will be back soon with more from Issue 47.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad