Sometimes a poem makes you feel happy. Sometimes a poem makes you feel sad. Sometimes a poem makes you feel viscerally upset for no discernible reason. This happened to me a few years ago, when I first read a fragment of “Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds” by former United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón. 

In the section I read—a screenshot somewhere on Instagram, or maybe a quote on a stranger’s blog—the speaker describes a friend “obsessed with plane crashes,” who memorizes flights, locations, details of the wreckage. He recounts what he knows to the speaker, and years later, she learns that “his brother was a pilot.” Notice the past tense there, how it critically recontextualizes the friend’s quirky interest in plane crashes as an expression of grief, of familial devotion, of a love that outlasts death. It’s a devastating story. You’re supposed to be devastated.

Then, I reached the last line, where the speaker concludes, almost confessionally: “I can’t help it, / I love the way men love.” And instead of being devastated, I was indescribably annoyed. It’s hard to say why. Even now, writing this sentence, I can’t figure out exactly what bothers me about that line. When I read it, I feel bad. I can’t think of a better word. 

I guess I feel like Limón’s speaker is buying into something I don’t want her to buy into. I get what makes the poem tragic and beautiful—the picture of a plane crash; the painstaking act of memorization; the wordless, unspoken love for a lost sibling. But there’s something about the way the speaker praises this form of love while also describing it as explicitly masculine that gets to me. And of course, it is masculine—the stoicism of it, the silence. I guess I don’t like the way the female speaker stares up exaltingly at “the way men love.” I guess I don’t like the way a poem about siblings turns into one about brothers.

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Love is gendered. There are girl ways to love and boy ways to love, everyone knows this. Women don’t open jars or kill spiders, don’t stand outside windows with boomboxes on their shoulders. Husbands don’t buy Christmas gifts for the in-laws. 

Men’s love, especially in a romantic context, is usually configured as active. He gives you flowers. He gets in a fight over you. He saves you from the tower. Women’s love is quieter, smaller. Think about Penelope from the Odyssey, waiting 20 years for her husband to come home. He fights monsters; he drags himself back to her. She waits.

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I’m a big fan of Twelfth Night (said every gay English major ever). It’s the Shakespeare play where the heroine, Viola, pretends to be a man and falls in love with a duke, who’s in love with a noblewoman, who’s in turn in love with Viola. Many things happen as a result of this situation. In the end, everyone gets straight-married and the world is beautiful. 

There’s a scene near the middle of the play where Orsino, the duke, declares the superiority of men’s love to women’s. “There is no woman’s sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion / As love doth give my heart,” he announces. “No woman’s heart / So big, to hold so much.” 

(I’m reminded of another poem by Limón, “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” that easily dismantles the sexist ideas in Orsino’s speech. “I like the lady horses best,” she writes, and later: “...somewhere inside the delicate / skin of my body, there pumps / an 8-pound female horse heart, / giant with power, heavy with blood.” And I remember, also, finding out in high school biology that my heart is, and always will be, physically smaller than that of a cisgender man, and I remember feeling hopelessly sad.) 

Some productions will have Viola look stunned, offended, even angry as Orsino goes on. She eventually interrupts him to defend “what love women to men may owe” with a story of a made-up sister of hers who loved a man but never told him. This sister “pined in thought / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument / Smiling at grief.”

It’s worth noting that Viola isn’t disputing the idea that men and women love differently. Rather, she’s arguing that women’s love is equal to men’s—maybe even that it counts as love at all. “Was not this love indeed?” she asks, and you can hear the question tear itself out of her. The position of stillness, of waiting, of sitting at a window and watching the seas for your husband’s return is, to Viola, just as meaningful as men’s acts of love, worthy of the same exaltation and admiration. She’s saying women’s love is love. She has to say it because not everyone knows.

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My friend Nora thinks a lot about horses and girls. She uses repetition in her work better than anyone else I know. Last August, in a poem for Denverse Magazine, she wrote that “girls don’t suffer like poets; they suffer like girls.”

Poetry, literature, the way we tell stories—they’re built on an ancient foundation that often presupposes a male speaker, author, and reader. It took me years of reading “Howl” to realize that when Allen Ginsburg says “the best minds of my generation,” he’s talking about only men.

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The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang is a series about war and violence and crimes against humanity. It’s also about love.

The central relationship of the trilogy is between Rin—a peasant orphan from nowhere, who rises meteorically through a series of increasingly unlikely roles: army soldier, rebel leader, mentally unstable fire magician, girl Mao, savior or destroyer of the known world—and her boy best friend Kitay. In the first book, they’re classmates at an elite military academy; by the last, they’re jaded strategists who only really trust each other. Rin has a number of romantic relationships throughout the series, but none come with the same narrative weight and fervent loyalty as her friendship with Kitay. The final book describes them as “a pair against the world.”

What’s interesting about Rin and Kitay is the way traditional gender roles are reversed in their relationship. Rin goes to war. She fights gods. She wins battles by burning everything in a fifty-yard radius. Kitay sits in an office somewhere and draws up tactical plans for her. Though neither character is explicitly described as queer, I would argue that there’s something compelling and deeply non-heteronormative about how the text allows Rin and Kitay to love each other in ways that don’t align with expectations for their respective genders. When Rin thinks about Kitay, she thinks about conventionally masculine acts of love—she wants to protect him, to rescue him from danger. She loves him the way men love.

The Poppy War is a military fantasy series—the main character has to fight battles and win wars; it’s ordained by the genre. A story that puts a woman in this traditionally masculine narrative role is already doing something transgressive and interesting, but I wonder if it’s possible to tell stories centered on traditionally feminine narrative roles as well. Can we imagine a story that follows Rin’s classmate Niang, a soft-spoken girl who chooses to become a medic rather than a soldier? Is this story more sexist—in that its protagonist is constrained to a conventionally feminine path in life? Or less so—in that it gives this feminine path a rarely-achieved narrative focus? What does this do to the book’s plot, to its genre?

There’s a scene in the last book of the series, where Rin is going off to yet another battle against gods and ancient monsters. Kitay isn’t going with her; he’s staying at camp where it’s safe. Before she goes, he tells her: “Come back to me.” It’s the kind of thing a girl says to a boy.

I know a story has to follow the action. I know Odysseus’s journey is factually more interesting than the static picture of Penelope sitting at her loom. I love what The Poppy War does with gender, how Rin’s girlness coexists with her anger, her power, her narrative role. And still, every time I read this scene, I want a story whose protagonist says “Come back to me,” instead of hearing it. I want a story that cares about the way women love.

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For a long time, whenever I came across that fragment of the Ada Limón poem, I assumed it was the whole thing. It’s self-contained; there’s a beginning, middle, and end. “I love the way men love” feels like a conclusion.

But it’s not the poem’s last line. The entire section is just one part of a longer poem, describing the speaker’s feelings about love, nature, and her former romantic partners. The whole poem does more than celebrate “the way men love,” going on to offer a complicated perspective on the speaker’s relationship with her own gender and the nature of romantic partnerships. “Why are we forced into such small spaces together?” she asks. I read this as a question both about the claustrophobia that comes with romantic relationships—the way closeness can be at once beautiful and terrible—but also about the rigidity of gender roles within these relationships—one of you has to love like a boy, the other like a girl. Small spaces.

I ultimately think there are two important ways we as writers can make these small spaces wider. First, by allowing for fluidity in our definitions of who can express masculine and feminine love. We can tell stories like The Poppy War, stories where women save, rescue, protect, stories where men wait for their wives to come home, and we can further explore how queer genders and sexualities relate to this fluidity. 

Secondly, we need to valorize women’s love in the same way men’s love has been valorized for centuries. We need more poems, plays, and novels that look outside the conventional boundaries of narrative to the women at the margins—the sailor’s wife, the wrinkled crone, the kidnapped daughter, the perfect mother, the weird girl, the cool girl, the girl who takes off her glasses and turns beautiful. The confinements these characters experience within the narrative—voicelessness, stillness, a lack of agency—reflect the real-world confinements placed upon women and girls. What does it mean to experience these restrictions? What does it mean to live within them and love anyway? If women’s love is “love indeed,” let’s tell stories that prove it.

I still can’t stand “I love the way men love.” But I like the poem better after reading the rest of it. There’s a complexity to it that I hadn’t seen before, a nervousness, a sadness. “I imagine the insides of myself sometimes,” says the speaker, “part female, part male, part terrible dragon.” It’s almost the kind of text I’ve been looking for—one that asks what it means to love like a girl.