Since 2020, I've been writing poems about houses, homeownership, and its
intersection with the immigrant experience in the US. You can read some
early versions of some of those poems at
Always Crashing.
Writing those poems naturally progressed into thinking about ideas of possession.
I asked myself a lot of questions: Who deserves romance? What about the erotic?
Why is there so much interest in controlling expressions of love? Why is there a mononormative and
heteronormative and cisgendered expectation of possessiveness in modern dating and love? And on and on.
Truthfully, I’ve never been a fan of the “love poem.” In fact, anything extolling
the virtues of ones-and-onlys kind of sends me running for the hills. But like a
true (and questioning, maybe) poet, I began to be drawn to that very thing which initially repulsed me.
(That's the push-pull of Eros, the Bittersweet, right?) So I started collecting love poems
that eschew ideas of romantic possession for something deeper. I wanted to read them over
and over again, to remind myself that such love was possible.
I've gathered them here, in this living archive, and occassionally post them on the 'Gram.
They are not all by non-monogamous writers, or queer writers, or writers who espouse the
values of romantic non-possession in their daily lives. They aren't even all about romantic love; some
allude to love in its other, and no less noble, forms: agape (unconditional love), philia (platonic love),
storge (parental love), eros (erotic love), etc. But in each of these poems, I found a seed, however
small, of freedom from convention and societal restraints.
Do you have a poem you'd like to add to this list? Tag me on IG @luchixaro and mention #LoveUnbound
or send me a suggestion via this form: