Joshua Uyheng is a PhD student in societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies the narratives and networks of global online hate. He graduated with degrees in mathematics and psychology from the Ateneo de Manila University, where he received the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts for poetry. Some of his work has been previously published in Cha, Kritika Kultura, and the Penn Review.
Pilgrimage
All night we trudged past old towns naming the mysteries of your childhood. Like beads to an old prayer, our rhythmless feet, tugging litany into litany, one glory strung into the next. Great eye of the moon unobstructed above us, dear black sky opening and opening: I attempt to match your pace beside you like the rest of your devoted city, hungering forward, longing to taste what trickles down into that quiet space this fevered hurry hollows out. Is this faith? I watch the branches of trees bending out over the horizon. In this restless light, what can they reach with such longing for? What angel off the edge of this edgeless dark won’t descend to hold them down? Beyond breaking? You know better than I. Who knows anymore what we are passing through, for what the passage itself requires that we become avenues? Our Lord scourged. Our Lord we scourge, too, though we love him, and because we love him, we long to touch his body mangled before us, slip our lives into the abyss of his hands. He holds them up to all our languishing mouths, oh morseled flesh, oh makeshift country, oh hurrying world we know not the threshold to. Still we hurry. So even you begin to hurry, you shuttle me through the din. From above, how must this convergence begin to appear: this pilgrimage of ghosts, now approaching, the moon held above us, the host now transfigured, this rounding, this fullness, now swelling and pulling us up with such hunger I wonder if I could reach out myself past the brink of my hands. Break it in half.
Before You Go
I have a poet friend who never asks for me to write him a poem. Even if he’s read every verse I send him, looks up the references to mythology I keep littering into the metaphors. He holds my hand through the messes of heartbreak, all the unmoving desires they mystify and obscure as they clamber onto the page, as they clamber into life like the bodies of believers being resurrected at the end of time. At the end of his life I wonder if he’ll know what he never asks he has already been living. Look at the light streaming in from the canopy. Our days together we never wrote perhaps knowing even the myths must envy the mundane miracles they are trying to tell. Here. Can you tell in this warm afternoon, as we pace through the heart of the old city— searching the Sunday market for stews and spiced meats we will assemble into a feast in the quiet room— what immortality is glazing our bodies with a gentle sheen not even a poem can begin to keep alive?