by Deborah Stein

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

Holding Up the Monster

Again to Make Sure

DEBORAH STEIN | May 2024 | Issue 33

“The wreck, not the story of the wreck.
The words are purposes, the words are maps”
— from The Wreck by Adrienne Rich

“This cannot be a portrait. The page is the size of a mirror but that doesn’t mean anything.
Once I looked at my arm and wanted to write about that. Write about the arm when the whole body is being abused.”
— from CREATURE by Amina Cain

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.

Deborah Stein, *We Live in Invisible Countries, Watercolor, Embudo River* water on paper, 5 x 8 in. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER

didn’t even have a name, just a ___________.

Rabbits are everywhere, hopping around.

+

SPRING

The dove had two babies on my fire escape.

I saw her protect the nest and then I saw the two babies as she moved herself to the rail to let in the sun. I saw her feed them and I saw her clean them. I saw her dry them and watched as she traded places every twelve hours with her partner. I saw the partner on them too. I saw the twin baby doves sitting helpless on a bed of spring green sedum in a flower pot on my fire escape.

The baby doves saw me or saw through me.

I appeal to the mother: I want to be the one to nurse them, vomit crop milk into their open pulsating throats, fly from tree to tree to tree as I test their ability to survive without the warmth of my body. I want to watch them from a far off branch grow big and learn. I want to teach them to fly but mostly I want to teach them to stay. But they will fly and on a rainy day they do.

Today I hold something to tell about while the mother eyes me applying blue eyeshadow around my eyes and sitting on my eggs.

+

A LULLABY

I am slowly illustrating a book that is also a lullaby, written by an acquaintance, a singer-songwriter, from a family of singer-songwriters. I sing it to the dove babies. It’s about a child who climbs up to the moon because she doesn't want to go to bed. In one picture she turns off the light to the moon and her sister requests that she turn it back on: My sister says bring back the light, I need it so I can sleep tonight.*

I am restless too, I say to the moon. I can't sleep too, I say to the lullaby. I am moving slowly in moon years too I guess, which actually isn't as slow as you imagine.

I write to the singer-songwriter that the book will be finished in moon years. “This could take fifty earth years,“ I write. “But I read that scientists are creating a new time zone for the moon, that mass and gravity can affect how time passes even on earth. We’ll all need new clocks eventually, with sea ice melt you know. Well, anyway, I'll try to speed this up somehow.”

“I trust you,” she writes back.

I keep her note on the wall next to the ladder next to the moon.

*words by Pieta Brown

DRESS UP

Out of all the clothes I might have kept, I find myself opening a box and unwinding my mother’s last bra.

It was in a hurry I’d packed up her belongings in the big suitcase, the belongings I’d just hurriedly unpacked as she lay dying. Now, in a hurry, I was packing again, belongings into a suitcase, the closet-like room in the memory care unit she’d been moved to, a town we didn’t know, a cold rainy November day, a Sunday, a pandemic Sunday, like every other day, her dying day, waiting for the coroners to declare her time of death, a Sunday, 9:50 am, the pandemic.

In the first minutes, just after the time of death I let go of her hand and looked to watch if her spirit was moving out, the last of anything I might see, the she I had missed for nearly a year. I watched her for the she that might depart to wherever it would go or whatever new body she was deciding to enter or whatever happens in the minutes after the body leaves us its ghost. I see nothing but her small body turn waxen.

I take down my paintings I had taped on her walls a few days before. I pack her small clothes, her pretty scarves, a disheveled wig I’d seen in our zooms where her head tilted right as she fell asleep in her sentences, her broken makeups, the toothbrush I hoped she’d used, a winter jacket I don't recognize, her small wrinkled shoes. Her bras and shirts were made dingy by washers we didn’t know. I lean the last orchid we’d ever brought her next to the door.

A look into her final purse, I find a bead from a beaded necklace, a broken geranium-colored lipstick, an empty pill case, a ragged leather wallet with a picture of my brother and my father, the whisper, “Debbie, get me out of this place”, a crushed package of saltine crackers.

We packed the car, never seeing the coroner, maybe they never came, and drove to the ocean. We went to the edge, left a circle of a few of her things on the sand, reminders of our months apart, she liked the beach sort of, and gave them to the sea.

Now it is four Aprils later, far from that November, and so I put her bra on and wear it around the room for a while but it felt not quite right. I put my hair in a way that is messy and that my mother would not like. I see my own boobs in the mirror have grown to look almost like my mother’s which she might call attention to. The bra is uncomfortable and I take it off and see it has her name tag ironed into it in a font I don’t like. The bra was her last bit of bondage. She died braless.

I shed the bra like a skin and go braless too, writing and reciting the words to this paragraph like a seabird wanting the sea back.

Deborah Stein, *Further Home,* watercolor and gouache on paper 12 x 16 in. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

SPRING MIGRATION

Outside, my husband is filling the feeders, poking tomato, chile and corn seeds into ruptured soil, soaking the sunflower seeds, inhaling lilacs, watering a sapling, touching the green velvet of new apricots, raking along our field with purpose, digging ditches to run water, if water ever comes, down the rows, so we can plant the small field with new ___________.

One bird out there walks the ground and eats seeds of the weeds we can't catch, another flashes to the feeder, another has a worm, and this year’s batch of hummingbirds drink a quart of sugar water a day. We can't make it fast enough for the little fuckers.

Three hundred and thirty three million birds are predicted to migrate tonight. They appear to be heading East so watch out East! Seven hundred and ninety four thousand, one hundred birds flew over our house in the West last night. I stayed awake worrying about humans but sure enough families of warblers, western tanagers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, flycatchers, sparrows, grosbeaks, kingbirds, queen birds went chattering over our spit of sky.

In the morning we could still hear them whispering as I parse.

Deborah Stein, *The River Holds Its Islands,* watercolor, gouache, Rio Grande water, color pencil on paper, 22 x 30 in. 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stein, *Animal Tea,* watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 5 in. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

TENDER BUTTONS

After a few months, I removed from my closet all my mother’s clothes I thought I'd keep for a while. I thought I’d see what it would be like to keep them, but then I thought to see what it feels like not to want them. I make the decision swiftly. Then I take it back. Then I swiftly make the decision to remove them again.

In the pile I’d kept was a soft blue nightshirt I’d given her one mothers day. It was soft, so soft, dotted with tiny edelweiss, but because we’d been apart for so long, I’d never seen the tag ironed inside the neck with her name on it. I touch the label and then see all the buttons are missing and I wonder where all the buttons went? I wonder if she wore it all day long, for days and days. I wonder how tender were those buttons to have been torn off? Did they come off in a washer packed full of nightclothes and buttons of a hundred other people, a thousand buttons clinking and sobbing in the washer? Did she pick them off herself? Was she careful? Did she bite and chew each one twice daily for days. Did she put them into her mouth all at once in protest for being locked away, far from her children, the only living people she knew who had left her in this place to pick buttons from her nightshirt, the nightshirt she probably wore all day, every day? Did the buttons melt away, as my mother melted away from me?

I don’t want the shirt but where will it go? Into a drawer for a while longer? Slip it into the sea? Slip it into this page?

∂runk årtists school

Chris in those days, who I shared an art studio with in the basement of an old brewery building in Brooklyn, got drunk and said definitively that “being an artist is a job. It’s not your life”. I got drunk and disagreed.

The place was so big that some Friday nights we’d smash our beer bottles in a far-off corner.

There was a while there when the neighborhood was elderly Italian grandparents, middle-aged Puerto Rican families, kids who were art handlers and restaurant workers. Still dotted with defunct warehouses where we could have cheap art studios, sometimes when we were done art-making and smoking cigarettes and wondering what’s the point, we’d zip up our winter coats and walk down under the BQE late at night under the steady snow to a new bar in an old swimming pool supply warehouse. We knew almost everyone including the roots rock DJ.

“Hey Johnny, is being an artist a job or a calling?”

“Whatever it is, just keep practicing assholes.”

Deborah Stein, *Fifty Years,* watercolor and gouache on paper 6 x 4 in. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

50 YEARS

If the artist’s job is to recognize then I recognize it can take fifty years to notice the other side of the room. If the artist’s job is to communicate then
This is when I get very quiet.
This is when you get to talk

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.