Dante and virgil In Hell

Joshua Uyheng

after William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Since here you almost can’t tell what flesh is
whose—

Know in this life it is not the saddling
or the unsaddling you want.

But the horse itself.

To feel—with your legs
draped over its body,

like a foe you dismember
upon the battlefield,

or upon this bed,
a husband you may this way

please—it shudder.

Joshua Uyheng is a poet from the Philippines pursuing a doctoral degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He received the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts in 2016, and he was a fellow for poetry at the Ateneo National Writers Workshop. His work has previously been featured in Kritika Kultura, Cha, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others.