The soup is meant to be a reminder. You want to remind her—with spices and matchsticked scallions and cracked seeds and noodles and thick, hot broth—you are all her body needs.
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
In Issue 8, we’re thrilled to share Bring to a boil, then simmer, by our featured writer Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Kaylais a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is currently a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. Her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, The Journal, and Joyland. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction and is an upcoming fellow for Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Bring to a boil, then simmer rides the edge between pleasure and pleasing; Kayla’s words are paired with the explosive artwork of painter Christina McPhee.
You’ll want to take your time with Christine Larsen’s graphic story, the end. Christine is a Harvey Award-nominated cartoonist and illustrator, who has created art for comics, book covers, stories, posters and websites; working with clients such as Dark Horse, Image, IDW, BOOM! Studios, Simon & Schuster, and Cartoon Network. In 2018, she created a 100-foot mural, titled Farewell to Night, at the Philadelphia International Airport. Larsen is an adjunct instructor at the University of the Arts and lives in North Philadelphia, where she “toils over an unforgiving drawing board, creating horrible wonders for the amusement of her demon cohort.”
This is the last issue from our current team of curated writers and artists. They’ve been a dream team in every way! If you love what you’re seeing, please share, tweet, retweet, comment, and post.
Khôra will be back with a new team of writers and artists in our next issue.
Yours,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
“The soup is meant to be a reminder. You want to remind her—with spices and matchsticked scallions and cracked seeds and noodles and thick, hot broth—you are all her body needs.”
— from Bring to a boil, then simmer by Featured Writer Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Issue 8 Highlights
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.
LEIGH HOPKINS 