Issue 34: This is a Blanket | words and artwork by Deborah Stein
"Ritual is important to societies but I am the only society in the room so I make the ritual. The candles lit, a small meal, just the two of us, me and my body..."
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’d like your work to be considered for future issues.
This is a Blanket | words and artwork by Deborah Stein
This is a Blanket
Grace, my neighbor, has a cold. Something knitted is paused on the arm of the couch, unfinished.
“I was going to make a blanket, but you know, I’m using bone needles to crochet today. The steel hooks are bad for you when you have a cold.”
Oh. It is her crocheting that is on the arm of the couch. I’m backing away, mouthing the words, chicken soup, but she is 93, so she knows this.
“Love you mi hijita,” Grace calls down her long driveway to me.
I walk home before sundown. I light the candles because it is the sabbath and call my husband. My husband tells me his grief counselor told him it's good to have a ritual. Ritual is important to societies but I am the only society in the room so I make the ritual. The candles lit, a small meal, just the two of us, me and my body.
The moon rises quickly and the three of us stare into each other, me, the moon, my body, portals that we are.
When next I am in the Walmart SuperCenter in Española, I don’t see bone needles, only wooden needles. I buy them in case I ever have a cold. Or learn to crochet. Because wood is close enough to bone. “I have plenty of yarn though—money can’t buy the yarn!” I tell the cashier, who just wants to put my needles into a plastic bag. Who just wants to get through the shift…
Read the full essay This is a Blanket 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. Deborah was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under The Volcano residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico and a resident at The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA in 2023. She's heading to the Milkwood Children's Book Residency in July of 2024. Her art and writing has appeared in KHÔRA, Rowayat, The First Person and in collaboration with Here Projects and she just finished her second solo exhibition of works on paper, VIBRANT MATTER at LDBA Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. When she isn’t working on her art she’s writing, each is part of the other for her, a practice which enters into the classes she teaches and lends support to the artists she strives to encourage through her rogue art school, The StoryCamp Disco.
Issue 34 Highlights
The crack in my armor by Michael Nagle
dervish; wolf 3 | poem and artwork by Melissa Leto
Part 3: Nadine's Consensual Home Invasion by Swati Sudarsan photograph by Michel O’Hara
Fire by Jesse Sorrell | sculpture by Sorcha McNamara
Artists and Writers
We’re looking for features and our future teams! To enter KHÔRA’s collaborative waters:
Writers, read about KHÔRA’s 500 Words here.
Artists, send your artwork to KHÔRA's Images here.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and KHÔRA will be back soon.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad