Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece,” 1964
Love Poem in Five Definitions
- Adultery (noun) \ əˈdəlt(ə)rē\ Voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a person other than the one to whom they’re married. Or less commonly, the many hours of sweet, raging-hot congress a woman never expected to have with an also-married-but-nearly-divorced man who slid into said person’s DMs one day with ambiguous intentions, saying she reminded him of a painting by Holbein, and seemed like someone with whom he might enjoy having coffee. Much has been made of this word’s judgmental linkage of a specific—and, if we’re honest, quite popular—kind of extramarital coupling with the word “adult” (see also “adulterate”), implying that to be grown is to be corrupted, which is bullshit, because we enter life as hollow cells, only to slowly fill with substance. Besides, is it even adultery if you were duped into marrying not a man (as your husband pretended to be, until he’d sealed the exits), but a festering sphincter of narcissistic self-loathing? And shouldn’t it matter if, the moment I first sat across from my lover, the erotic energy crackled audibly enough that the bored barista looked up from his phone, wondering if lightning had struck?
- Factitious (adjective) \ fak-ˈti-shəs \ Not true or genuine. Or less commonly, true or genuine, because how can a word with “fact” in it have nothing to do with authenticity? How can it come so close to meaning the same thing as “fictitious,” which is basically its antonym? Makes me question whether I’m living in reality or in a simulation. Whether when my lover says “I love you,” he means something other than what I mean—whatever that is—and if it even matters, so long as it feels like love. Don’t hold onto me too tightly, he says. I loosen my grip on his naked body, only to hear him say, I meant in an emotional sense. I say, Stick with the figurative painting and leave the figurative language to me. Our shared compulsion is creation—or rather re-creation, the hyphen being necessary because we’re not talking about sports, but about the capture and curation of life’s fragments. We are, in this way, analogous. I mistook it, at first, for one-ness.
- Eudaemonia (noun) \ yüdēˈmōnēə \ A state of well-being or happiness. Or less commonly, that feeling when my demons—all of them—go to sleep. My Abandonment Issues, Food Addiction, Body Dysmorphia, and even the ever-gnawing Urge to Self-Mutilation, all quiet. Which seems to happen most consistently when I’m with my lover, whom I touch via touchscreen more often than skin, wretched at the thought of other, promiscuous fingertips dabbing up flakes of his brightness. I try, with words, to stay connected, but he often avers, leaving my texts unread, replying to just a handful of my thousand emails—even the ones containing pieces composed for him. For his birthday, I handwrite, in green ink, a memoir of our first six months. He reads a few pages and stops because (he says) it scares him. I try to understand: words have harmed this man. She said “I’m happy” for decades, then denied she ever meant it, even at first.
- Pulchritude (noun) \ ˈpəl-krə-ˌtüd \ Physical comeliness. Or less commonly, an emaciated beauty that belongs only in a sepulcher, because it sounds like a sepulcher, and looks like a skeleton, and what even is comeliness, and who defines one strange, archaic word with another? And who wants to be skinny, anyway? I’m beautiful as I am. So’s everyone. Except for twenty-two-year-olds with twenty-two-inch waists who whine about how fat they feel while posting thirst traps—screw them. My lover may look. He may like and comment. He may spend hours engrossed in such contours. But isn’t all that just part of being an artist who paints the human form? And shouldn’t it take more than corporeal beauty to hold the erotic fascination of a sapiosexual? He says he wants to save things, an impulse I, too, obey. But how can I explain, without implied rejection of his work, the way images of such women have harmed me? How often I cut myself on the shards of fresher, more-fetching facades and fleshes (the nudes on my husband’s phone, the videos on his laptop) almost—more than once—to the point of bleeding out?
- Ravel (verb) \ ˈra-vəl \ To become unwoven or unwound. Or less commonly, as I said earlier about the word “factitious,” what’s going on here, and why do so many words contradict themselves? How does “ravel” mean the same thing as “unravel,” and who allowed this to happen, and why do I, when I’m not with my lover, so often find myself raveling, unravelling, falling apart, although he said he thinks of me constantly, because how—unless I ask him every second—do I know that hasn’t changed now? Or now? How about now? I wonder if this is why love fails. Do we think we’re weaving when really we’re always unweaving? Is every connection, from the moment it forms, in the process of coming undone? Perhaps words are the problem, undermining even as they mine, revealing by dissecting, and thereby destroying, the thing revealed. Or perhaps images are the problem, capturing misleadingly flat slices of multidimensional things, skewing the beautiful into the hideous, angling the ugly toward the sublime. Or perhaps all art is the problem. How would it feel to still the shuttle, to snap the threads, to cease, once and for all, the effort of ensnaring life’s traces? To hold my lover’s gaze and know that this real, uninterpreted thing—for however long it lasts—can be enough?
Francesca Leader’s poetry and CNF have been published in Abyss & Apex, Broadkill Review, Identity Theory, and elsewhere, receiving nominations for Best of the Net (2025) and Best Spiritual Literature (2025). Her debut poetry chapbook, Like Wine or Like Pain, is available from Bottlecap Press.)