Dark Spaces

By Heather Mydosh

For Indiana HEA 1337

Eve is a common punch line
in the joke against women
with her penchant for the forked tongue
and listening to more than one
authority figure, but if we
peel it back a little further
to rectilinear Pandora, bless her,
created first among women
by temperamental adolescent gods,
she had it even worse—at least Eve
knew what the apple looked like,
could touch it, fingertip trace its cheeks
and test for firmness. Fondling wouldn’t
have done Eve in, but all Pandora
had to do was crack her box
for the proverbial peak.
She couldn’t have known
what was in there, what could take root
in the world outside herself.
If she could have known,
of course she wouldn’t have
opened it and damned herself
to a notoriety which outstrips her gods.
Still we punish women who look
inside themselves to see
what seeds we bear, what traits,
what crooked stems and strains,
and we damn with new laws
those who slam the lid back down
and seal up in their cups and vessels
that which they will not tend and grow.

Heather Mydosh is a professor at Independence Community College in southeast Kansas and a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, After the Pause, 99 Pine Street, The Corvus Review, and Kansas Time + Place among others. Visit Heather’s website to learn more.

Painting credit: From the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.