June, Eating by Zoë Fay-Stindt
Issue 52 Pride Issue Highlights
Call for Submissions | Special Summer Editions: HEAT and FLASH
The grass beats its edges
on wind: in a great
white surge the moths
rise overnight: I watch
my lover eat her first fig
whole: pulped tongue: jellied
fingers at the neighbor’s
kitchen table….
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist. Raised by both the swamps of Pomouik and Lumbee lands in eastern Carolina and the Hérault river of Languedoc, France, they are a sixth-generation settler currently residing on unceded Cherokee territory (colonially known as Asheville, North Carolina). As a writer, teacher, and facilitator, their work orbits entanglement, queer ecologies, belonging, and what it means to be in relationship with a land settled by their ancestors. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Center for Humans and Nature, Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.
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:
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
+
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
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Previously unpublished work only, please.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.
An important note: 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 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 an 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
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.