Dante’s Barmaids

  Of nymphs, I write for money; On canvas, there they dance. “Champagne,” they laugh, in corsets corked with bubbles popping out.   — This poem was inspired by a detail from “Inferno,” a painting by contemporary Swedish artist Per-Inge Isheden. “Inferno” is a portrait of the nineteenth-century Swedish playwright, literary luminary and painter August Strindberg (1849 –