Poem of the Week | October 13, 2025

“Jason” by David Ehmcke is our Poem of the Week.

David Ehmcke lives in Brooklyn. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drift, swamp pink, Image, EPOCH, The Adroit Journal, MAYDAY, Bodega Magazine, and like a field. David’s chapbook, Broken Lyre, was the editors’ selection in Quarterly West’s 2025 Chapbook Contest and will be published by them in the coming year.

Jason

Who is the worst man in the world?
The daylight’s bluntness mocks me.
I cannot look at flowers without thinking of sex.
And the heart responds, “He who has hurt you
with most acute specificity.” After a nasty dispute,
he calls me psycho fag and my passions
esoteric and bourgeois. The despair
that follows betrayal is the fallout of an unseen explosion
in a very real world. I go into the crude afternoon.
I take in its lushness and identify with tree rot
and cigarette ash. Your problem, a friend
of a friend reports, is that you’re sour
and private. What you need is a little life.
I am wan and mutable, a prisoner
to the problem of point of view.
Sometimes I break things
to assert a sense of control. I have tried
to think of the mind as a corridor
with many lockable doors. Useless!
I pull the sheets off my bed and throw a book at the wall.
Cold and unkempt, the erotic imagination
won’t quit. I am a spurned attendant
before the flame of it. Wicked,
conniving, obscene, he calls me,
and tears the buttons from his coat,
which I gave him.

Author’s Note

In June of 2022, I attended a twenty-four-hour durational performance by Ariana Reines called Divine Justice at Performance Space in New York. The performance in part assessed the varied myths of Medea and some scholarship that engaged the notions of justice those myths advance. I love everything Ariana Reines does because, no matter the occasion, she leaves me brimming with ideas. If I’m remembering right, I felt especially gripped by one offhand comment she made about how contending with the myths of Medea meant understanding what it is to be made into “the worst woman in the world.”

Later, I was thinking about how so often it seems that abandonment or betrayal requires a straw man in order to justify itself. It is easy to remember Medea as an evil witch who murdered her children and to absolve Jason of his betrayals, partaking in and causing the tragedy of the house. There’s a way of reading Medea as a tragic figure who finally stepped into the role of the monster that was made for and forced onto her. In certain moods, I read her acts of revenge as saying, Try to exile me, and I will give you someone to exile. If Medea is the worst woman in the world, it is because she has been made so by Jason, whom it would only be fair to deem the worst man in the world, an equal agent in their charnel pas de deux.

I’ve felt that many of the lovers’ dramas I’ve heard about or lived mime the contours of a Medea-like myth. Always these stories seem lined with fallacies, red herrings, and “the worst men in the world.” I wanted to write a poem about the problem of perspective, how any coherent account of an affair can seem an act of both justification and self-mythology, and the strange cohabitation of cruelty and affection that has characterized some relationships of mine, so I wrote this poem. While I take the title, “Jason,” from the myth, I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to inform anyone’s reading of the poem. Speaking to Jason is my way of speaking to my personal Jason, the Jason I’ve been, and to every version of the “worst man in the world,” who is constantly being resurrected and revised.