Dante, Guided

“bite back your spleen!” you cry, reading aloud

and the first thing i think is

(if you asked me to i would)

there’s a quick beauty in how your eyes flash

dante, aloft in your arms

and in between each beat of my heart

i lose myself in the rapture.

a grand flick of your hand to beckon the next canto

from my tongue—

instead, i ask for you to read,

pretending alighieri confuses me

when in reality, he and i are closer than sin

beatrice speaks, and the world quakes.

we stumble, dizzy on something divine

and i know i can’t tell you, but

right now, we are tipsy on laughter, and i can’t help

but to think

you will leave me in eight months

but i would follow you into hell just to live like this

with the sun streaming through your hair

and inferno on your lips.

“dante collapses in the second circle because he
realizes how easily he could have been trapped there,
led astray by uncontrollable love.” -ap lit, december
fifth, twenty-nineteen

“god, same.” -me, under my breath

Manasvi Vora is a freshman majoring in Chemical Engineering. No, she doesn’t know how she started writing poetry.