Two Glories | essay by Bec Bell-Gurwitz
"I understood the pull toward river. I understand it still."
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you want your work to be considered for future issues.
Over the next two weeks, we will introduce you to the members of KHÔRA’s new curated team. This brilliant group of writers and artists is collaborating with us to bring you four gorgeous issues between now and June 2023. Today’s essay is by writer Bec Bell-Gurwitz with artwork by Fid Thompson.
Bec Bell-Gurwitz is a writer living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck land. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Thrice Fiction, and others. Bec won Writing by Writers’ 2022 San Juan Residency, is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, and placed as a finalist for The Southwest Review's Meyerson Fiction Prize. Bec is currently an MFA candidate in prose and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Fid Thompson is an artist, writer, gardener, wonderer, queer white human who grew up in rural England. Her art is informed by her bi-cultural family and the humans, cultures, creatures, plants, and landscapes of the places where she has lived. Her work inquires into inner and outer worlds and weathers, nature, mental health cycles, and portraiture of all the kinds. Fid has twice been a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ Fellowship, including for her Queer Enough portrait project, and is a 2023 grantee of the Washington Project for the Arts's Wherewithal grant. She is currently writing about worms, among other things.
Two Glories by Bec Bell-Gurwitz | artwork by Fid Thompson
Two glories on a walk today. I will write them present, though I will be at my desk and when I read, I will be even farther displaced in time. I will write two glories as if we are still there together watching them happen and I am not here trying to render what can’t be.
My dog finds a dead baby bird face down on the path. I don’t look long enough to confirm whether it is a bird, or if it is really dead. My response is fast. I do not think of the bird, if it may still be alive, if it is a bird at all. I only think of mouths, not the bird’s body broken in my dog’s, but a mouth wide open with its tongue furiously lapping at the soft skin of my cheek. A mouth is a cradle. I pull hard at my dog’s neck. I try to think of another way, but this thought only comes after I’ve already hurt him. I look for signs of betrayal in his face even though I find none—he just trots on, forward movement, the moment over…
Read Two Glories.
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Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad