Khôra's Pushcart Nominations
We’re thrilled to announce Khôra’s nominations for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series. It was difficult to choose only six pieces to represent what we’re creating. In the words of one of our reviewers, “it’s a testament to how much amazing work Khôra has amplified in 2021.”
Congratulations to the six brilliant writers who were nominated by Khôra for The Pushcart Prize:
Your Future Self Is a Stranger by Kat Lewis (Issue 6)
Unfinished Translation by Grace Loh Prasad (Issue 4)
Why I Will Vaccinate by Sagirah Shahid (Issue 4)
Mourning by Adam Swanson (Issue 11)
Above All Was the Sense of Hearing Acute by Sabrina Tom (Issue 9)
Bring to a boil, then simmer by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (Issue 8)
To all of our writers and artists in 2021, your contributions create a body of art that we're proud to share every month. To our readers and subscribers, thank you for your enthusiastic response to Khôra. Your donations help us pay our writers and artists, something that's incredibly important to us as a small publication.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back soon.
Yours,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
Pushcart Nomination Excerpts
Your Future Self Is a Stranger by Kat Lewis / Artwork by Lynne Harlow
“When I was twenty-three, I promised my best friend I would carry her child. The year after we graduated from college, doctors needed to do a hysterectomy to save her life—a surgery she was considering forgoing. “If I can’t be a mother, I should just die,” Bora had told me in the black of our San Francisco apartment as we watched Where the Wild Things Are. We sat on our secondhand sofa, sharing my childhood blanket, and I tried to imagine life without her…”
Read Your Future Self Is a Stranger.
Unfinished Translation by Grace Loh Prasad / Artwork by M. Florine Démosthène
“The border between one year and the next slowly unfurls; the first day of the new year wrapping its arms around the globe with Tonga celebrating first, and then moving westward across all the continents, reaching American Samoa last. A crooked seam bisects the Pacific Ocean, separating today from tomorrow…”
Read Unfinished Translation.
Why I Will Vaccinate by Sagirah Shahid / Artwork by Christa David
“3) Justice
Before the Belmont report when the U.S. Government gathered 600 Black men who tilled Alabama’s blood stained terrain with their calloused hands, first generation to grow up technically free, in the sense that…”
Read Why I Will Vaccinate.
Mourning by Adam Swanson / Artwork by Jen Fuller
“To exhume a body, all you must do is breathe yourself out—
perhaps early, in the morning, as the sun wakes
somewhere in a watery desert or at the foothills of a sweet
yellow mountain.
There, there you are. Breathing.”
Read Mourning.
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.
Bring to a boil, then simmer by Featured Writer Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya / Artwork by Christina McPhee
“Ginger and garlic and hot pepper and fennel butter-sputter in the bottom of a soup pot while you wrap your bloody finger with a damp paper towel. Your fingertip caught on the grater again. Distracted by the wound, you burned the butter. The smell reminded you of pancakes, but you chucked the brown gloop in the sink and began again. Butter, ginger, garlic, hot pepper, fennel—back in the pot. Turmeric and coriander seeds, too.
A grated finger is nothing.”
Read Bring to a boil, then simmer.
