Darby Myr is a queer writer, textile artist, trained anthropologist and tree planter. Their work is forthcoming in SQUID literary, Qu Literary, and Interim Poetics. They are based out of Montreal when they aren’t stuck in the teeth of the northern Rockies.
“I wrote Aesop’s Fingers are Crossed in conversation with a 15th century woodcutting for Aesop’s fable “The Frogs Who Desired a King,” which was originally published in Vita et Fabulae (Aesop) (1485) and which graces the cover of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry book named for the same fable, King Log (1968). I was touched by the sumptuous quality of the print, the near insinuation that the tongue of the serpent consuming the frogs could be the frog’s own, its hunger and diction links in the chain to both divinity and its own devouring. The serpent and the frogs are wrapped in a reciprocity delivered from the heavens, the frogs all-but-one hypnotized by the presence of their wrathful lord, the Serpent King greedily gobbling them up in turn. In my poem I explore the twin themes of the woodcutting and the fable it illustrates, the conundrum of how the lowly yearn for their own policing, manifest it in their prayers, are dissatisfied with their leadership until it destroys them. The log they are offered as king is insufficient. To be led is to be subjugated in Aesop’s eyes, a wrestling match the printmaker supplants with a literal one in the top panel, harkening to Hercules wrestling Antaeus. Antaeus cannot be defeated as long as his feet touch the earth, much like the frogs would not be consumed if they did not demand the gods provide them a king.”
