Flank and Cutlass: Writing Love Poems

Feb 07, 2025

I know. It’s not what you expect from me.

Flank Let’s tell ourselves the truth: we make this love, this farm, this marriage, by disjointing the mouth of the horse, sonneting him wild, leaving his supple flanks dismembered in the barn. Let me be honest. I love you like I fear God. A part of me is always severe and coltish under your gaze, a partition in me swinging like the hips of the sea, swearing: I’m open, I’m open, I’m open. Come drown me in my own wetness. Come, hear me thank you for the ruined coastline of pulse. Lord, if you’re honest, you know I prayed for you. Not equine with pride, rather on my knees: alert to the scold of my own virginity, deribboning, unboning my purity as original myth. One of these things does not exist, hymen or hysteria. Test which. I could tell you I love you as the virgin loves, or I could bring you the flanks of the horse, blood ready and whistling.

“Flank” is nearly a decade old, and it reveals more than one of my preoccupations from the very outset: let’s tell ourselves the truth, it starts, while knowing the truth to be the thing you scrape from the base of your heel and hold to the light — never the neat, chaste artefact. Always the thing in need of worrying, bruising, forking over with tines til it gives up some secret worth holding or hiding. The truth beneath the truth, then.

I understand much of poetry through invocation. It’s no secret that there is a summoning in “Flank” in the most literal sense - Come / Come invokes the poem’s speaker to their lover. I’m open, I’m open, I’m open, they declaim. That might seem to run counter to my primary obsession with sepulchral or entombed or ossified truth, but it isn’t, not really. What we claim most urgently to be true about ourselves is worth some scrutiny in a poem: what we have our speakers believe incontrovertibly always holds, wrapped in a skin it’s poised to shed, something delicious for scrutiny.

No one would accuse Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting of being a book of love poems. Yet love was urgent on my mind when I wrote so much of it: not always romantic or carnal love, but often, yes, that very state of bewilderment and feverishness and toxicity and splendour we often call love. I was curious about how it worked between people afraid to define it; more precisely, I wanted to know how people who had been taught to be fearful of their own desire could face up to it, could enact their own love.

Matikoor Here is where I want you, unhidden by the wedding moon, fat as a secret bride spilling with stolen fruit. Here is where I press you, segmented sticky into the flanks of a Julie mango, into the garden ground of my mouth. Here is where I have brought you to flail, to fight, to writhe, to die on my tongue or else to live forever. There is nowhere the eyes of the tribunal men won’t find us. We dance as though death is coming for us, as though the tremble of an execution waits in the noose of my brown arms around your brown neck, your brown nose bridging my brown nose, wedding sweat on my brow and between my breasts. O, I work closer to the lit deya of you, the last flambeau on the coastal road of you, the hot cutlass goldening in the village sun of you, the rippling, robust certainty of you, your skin polished with the two thousand and twenty two years of your survival.

“Matikoor” is a newer creation than “Flank”, but attends many of the heart’s same needs. The instruments are different — the flanks of a horse, versus the last flambeau on a coastal road — but both speakers are pursuing their love(r)s to uncertain ends… and that’s love, right? An ongoing, relentless, urgent yawp into the maw of I don’t know, into the absence of forever. We don’t know if the tribunal men will catch up to the women lovers wound up in each other’s arms at the matikoor. We don’t know if the lover will accept that dowry of the bloodied horse’s flanks. We can but hope.

There. That’s love, right? If so, it’s what I’m almost always chasing in a poem — the belief despite belief, the ragged boxer stumbling on their feet after the ninth round, the flag torn and held aloft in the face of genocidaires. The hope like a burst wound.

Since love (poetry) obeys its own timeline, it really isn’t too late to join Ella Frears and I for our Arvon online course next week:

We’ll be teaching, talking, and thinking through all things relational in poems, featuring love of all kinds — the wild, the wicked, the wondrous. Here’s how Ella and I pressed our suit for the course description:

Confess it – this season of love, you want something a little deeper. Something that stings, dazzles, sparks fire when you touch it – and you’re not so sure you’ll find it on Bumble. This Valentine’s, write into the sharp, fizzy centre of love with us, and pull new drafts of poems from the wastelands of your old situationships, the furtive pages of your teenage obsessions. From the romantic to the risqué, the racy to the reverent, we’ll read and discuss poems that make your eyes widen and your pulse race, then we’ll turn their transformative power towards your own shiny, not-safe-for-work drafts. Whether you’re writing a suite of sexy sonnets, ghazals to the ghosts of your lovers, or a long narrative adoration to a tree, all your love poems – about all inhabitations and stations of love – are welcome here. Be your own hurricane, your own moor-struck heroine, your own bloody beautiful valentine. Whether you’re completely new to poetry or have been writing love poems for decades – join us.

A very few places remain, and if you’d like to join us, you can sign up here.

The world is on fire. We have mad fucking kings. The wars continue, unabated. So whatever shivering hopes we can forage from the poems, love poems and all the rest of them, let’s have them, darlings. I hope for you the kind of love you most require.

“Flank” was first published in Jet Fuel Review, Issue 14, Fall 2017.

“Matikoor” was first published in Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (fourteen poems), 2023.

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