Borrowing from ancient and contemporary narratives from around the world, as well as trivia, popular culture, and psychoanalytic and critical theory, Miriam Stoney’s poem explores the role of debt and indebtedness in its relational, monetary, moral, and creative dimensions. Written from the perspective of the Fortune Teller, the work tells the story of the articulations, (mis)understandings, and intuitions about debt. Stoney’s text explores how debt is a kind of curse (such as a fortune teller might issue), and how credit and debit are fundamental organising belief systems. After all, our relationships to the past, present, and future are formatted by debt—things we are owed, or things we owe others—and these often make the future a space of worry. Can debt, then, serve as a way of predicting the future?

Ours is a world in which debt is foundational: credit lines pay for housing, or in education systems pay for student loans. More positively, debt can be seen as an obligation, as the acts and deeds we owe one another to reinforce the social fabric. Miriam Stoney explores the many senses of debt in a new poem commissioned for «Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron», and published by Kinakaal Forlag.