“An empty man is full of himself.” Edward Abbey
I
When God split the Adam what He took avoids closure. Eve’s disappointment in this contraction of mud, a golem well-crafted but incomplete. Man’s resentment at her for being torn in half, forced to share his Maker’s image but not enough to spare. He wept petitions in the lap of Tigris & Euphrates, “Please, please!” he moaned, “She’s too singular to be understood!”
II
Only when his efforts came to thorns and thistles did the rivers soothe him. “There, there,” they said, “Only the immature cannot feed themselves.”
III
With a pain in our side deeper than our conviction (codependent, forever slightly unmade), our work became a prayer: “Make me more perfect than she is.”
IV
What is wrong with men? A fragment divided, convinced they deserve to be One flesh. Slaves to the word “again.”
V
If Gallus said “love conquers all” why is the Great God Pan always hungry no matter how much I eat? The libido writes “forever” in disappearing ink. The pelvic mantra chanting excuses called devotion. All your descendants fill a teaspoon. Individuality is only how tight you grip your leash.
VI
Confidence is boredom with oneself. A boy becoming a man, a fairy tale leased in a hermit crab’s shell, in any covering that will have it.
VII
Our fathers in the Land of Nod suffered with determination, lacking humility, built walls shut off from women’s inquisition so no angelic sword could evict them again from their fortified cities named “I Am Frightened.”
VIII
Strife is justice until you accept all things.
IX
Without anger you feel powerless, the world’s eunuch. Easily threatened when every kiss ends in buyer’s remorse and the only name we’re given is “not enough.” Beware, whatever part of you is unloved is capable of anything.
X
Men, guard your care for we become like what we worship and will lay down our lives for the right one as easily as for the wrong one.
✶✶✶✶
Denmark Laine is a St. Louis poet, novelist, and music critic whose work has been published by Spartan Press, Subprimal Poetry, STL TV Live, the St. Louis Poetry Slam, Eleven Magazine, Bad Jacket, Panoply Zine, Sentience Literary Journal, and Book of Matches. He has a BFA in English from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is the author of Silversexuals, The American Paranoid Society, Thorazine Ice Cream Parlor, Exile On Cherokee Street, and The Martyr of Bughouse Square. He is also art director for Back of the Class Press.
✶
Jennifer Kircher Herman is a writer and photographer. In her photography, she is drawn to statues, as they capture in stone the emotions of the human hands that carved them. She is widely published in literary journals, including North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Alaska Quarterly, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, and The Nebraska Review, where her work also won the Fiction Prize. She holds an MFA from Emerson College and has been selected to participate in numerous writing workshops including Bread Loaf, One Story, and Kasteel Well, where she won the fiction fellowship. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays on yearning, art, and the human condition.
✶
Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.
Another Chicago Magazine 