Issue 33: Holding Up the Monster Again to Make Sure | words and paintings by Deborah Stein

"I once stood in a book store and opened a book of poetry by a woman I used to call friend. I opened her book to a poem about me. I saw I was in the poem because it began something like..."

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Deborah Stein, La Noche, watercolor, gouache on paper, 12 x 16 in. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

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Holding Up the Monster Again to Make Sure | words and paintings by Deborah Stein

POEM

I once stood in a book store and opened a book of poetry by a woman I used to call friend. I opened her book to a poem about me. I saw I was in the poem because it began something like: “I broke a friend’s heart once and I’d do it again.”

I understood the poem was about her and not me. I knew the poem was about me, but really the poem was about her and the poem of course was about being human. The words of the poem I read were more scene notes than poem.

The notes I read were about that which sits lowest in the body, that which tells the rightness of the most instinctive part of our animal, that which holds war, saves every eye and tooth it has protected but also has taken and that which moves the whole of itself far from that which might threaten its story. It was very old testament. That which has a feeling, moving it to create legend or poetry, the notes of us which do the story-ing which become poem, war, monster. 

“I have thus endeavored to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, though I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations” wrote Percy Shelley in his 1818 preface to Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus when the story was attributed to him. 

I knew I was in the poem because it began something like: “I broke a friend’s heart once and I’d do it again,” thinking for only a minute the poet may have broken the hearts of other friends or maybe it was a fiction but no, it was a poem. I knew it was about me because I could read the words and accept the license. And there, in a well-lit bookshop I was, holding up the monster again to make sure.  

Read Holding Up the Monster Again to Make Sure on KHÔRA.

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view more of Deborah Stein's paintings on KHÔRA.

Deborah Stein is an artist and writer who lives between New York City and Northern New Mexico with her partner James and their little dog Pablo. Her second solo show, VIBRANT MATTER is at LDBA Gallery in Santa Fe through May 19, 2024. Deborah was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under The Volcano residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico in January 2023, and was in residency at The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA in May 2023. Her art and writing has appeared in Khôra, Rowayat, The First Person and in collaboration with Here Projects. When she isn’t working on her art she’s writing, each is part of the other for her. Both enter into the classes she teaches and her practice lends support to the artists she strives to encourage and inspire through her rogue art school, The StoryCamp Disco.

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Swim around in Issue 33.

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Artists and Writers

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With galactic gratitude,

Leigh Hopkins
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