Published on November 27, 2024

Polyamory & The Poem: A Zuihitsu

Shlagha Borah | Contributing Writer

My partner is in love with my best friend and there is no other way to confess this particular heartbreak.
I tweet, “Goal for 2024: Anarchy.” A writer I had met only once replies, “*anarchism.” He is at least twenty years older than me.
I distinguish anarchy from anarchism and thank him for his service.
In polyamory, there is no way to separate the friend from the lover from the partner from—
No form has felt polyamorous to me yet.
In a workshop I took with Franny Choi, they said the Cento is the queerest form possible. A whole greater than the sum of its parts. Overlapping, blurred voices. Communal, deceptive. A way to hide your voice in the folds of loudness.
Queer as in not who you sleep with but as in how you live your life. Not who you love but how.
Relationship Anarchy: Relationship anarchy, a term coined by queer feminist Andie Nordgren, is a relationship philosophy which draws its tenets from political anarchy, the main one being that all relationships (romantic and otherwise) shouldn’t be bound by any rules not agreed upon by the involved parties. – Katie Heaney, “What It’s Like Being a Relationship Anarchist”, The Cut
Simply put, I am swimming towards dissecting everything I have been taught about love.
“When it comes down to bare bones, a poetic ‘form’ is simply a set of constraints put on a poem.” – Anne Marie Wells. What if these aren’t constraints but doors? Would freedom then feel possible? To break form is to embrace polyamory.
Freedom as an act of willful restraint (To begin, we must start slow. Find yourself a pair of fuzzy handcuffs & a partner you can trust). To adhere to the form or not will come later. First, we arrive in tongue.
In striving towards anarchy, I had to first follow the rules. I had to find my ancestors. Having found no manifesto, no guidebook, I knelt before poets. Jericho Brown’s Duplex, torrin a greathouse’s Burning Haibun, Kimiko Hahn’s Zuihitsu, Rick Barot’s Hermit Crab – these queer forms called out to me. In tearing down the seams of form, these poets stitched new quilts.
What I’m trying to say is, polyamory is a kind of formlessness.
When I first started seeing other people, my partner sent me 275 texts in the middle of the night. He said he wished he’d never met me. [Backspace]
That was eleven months ago. What is left of us now is scattered across three oceans. I attempt to find form in the waves. They bruise from the rocks. I lose form to rigidness.
“Is the answer not a poem?” – Ching-In Chen. What is the question we’re asking?
I return to the body of the poet. Girlgirlgirl girlgirl girl gi rl gir l is no longer a girl she is formless. I burn my haibuns and it still feels like an act of obedience. My grief explodes on the landscape of the page. The archaeology of the poem _____ (I want to say “demolishes” but it appears to be an ending. The poem is ever-expanding.) There is no form that can hold a grief this impenetrable.
My partner pierces their nose. They dye their eyebrow red, then green. They paint their lashes. Notice how we multiply when we feel safe.
In every dream, I am running.
Freedom as an act of willful restraint (When there is so much to hold it spills over to the neighbor’s yard. The poet dances in the moonlight. The poet is in search of pleasure). The page presents itself as a container for blankness. I offer it my words and it gulps them down. This is where we go to disappear.
Anarchy might be the answer. It might help me find which socket in the house has stopped working, why our lamps won’t light anymore, why we never talk about sex, why he sleeps with someone else, why do I, why, why?
After every Bumble date I go on, I write a Cento. I now have a Cento of Centos, a master Cento, if you will. It feels like a gesture towards queerness, towards multiplicity, but not in the way I desire. It still leaves gaping holes of wanting.
The man on Twitter says, “I guess my playfulness was unearned.” Once more, my body is a playground. Once more, body as a war zone.
I wonder if this is a Zuihitsu or just a list. I am practicing anarchy of form. I am straying away from jurisdiction.
“listen I love you joy is coming” – Kim Addonozio
I want this to be my first tattoo. To be inked is to commit to a particular form yet alter the playground that houses it.
How many times have I walked up to the door and turned away before knocking?
Today, my friend told me to be fluid. We were deadlifting. Is formlessness a form in itself? What are the academics saying? Why are poets obsessed with water? How can I identify the tension between language and syntax? Where in this list does disobedience live?
Do the dead know we are constantly mourning our past?
Of course, I am mourning (present continuous).
When I say anarchy, I don’t just mean overthrow the government. I mean liberation, I mean kink positivity. I mean healing. I mean forgiving myself. To me, anarchy is the deconstruction of the perception of an ideal self. To recognize that I will always be a self-portrait in transit. I am a shadow, a mirror, a mural.
My partner is learning how to tattoo pig skin. They want to etch an anchor on me.
How do I write poems about this heartbreak? How do I break monoliths? Why are we so obsessed with labels, with meaning-making? Why does so much of the world not make sense to us? Why do we persist?
Maybe tonight I will drink cheap wine and dance naked in my living room. I guess I am trying to accept that formlessness is indecipherable.
The man I have been sleeping with for seven months
says he has been hit by the holiday depression arc. He recoils

until nothing except his breath remains. He says, “I love
waking up next to you and morning sex is great but I have

to get home to my dogs.” He keeps insisting that we’re
friends. I think of Maggie Millner’s Couplets, and I remember

my poetry professor declaring it to be the perfect form
for parallels, for lovers. Since we aren’t lovers,

how and where do I break form; (broken couplet)

do couplets become polyamorous the same way couples do his smallness stifles me I am a bouquet of pampas on the windowsill quenching this parchment with ignition

(bro/ken cou/ple)

My partner and I are in an anchor relationship. Anchor/ noun: a person or thing that provides stability or confidence in an otherwise uncertain situation.
“If poetry is not testimony, then what is?” – Malcolm Tariq
The poem is unscathed. The poem is a witness. The poem has crossed every picket line to reach you, dear reader.
Polyamory as excavation of truth: Every path we take is terrifying. I am anchorless.
On the Zuihitsu, Ching-in Chen writes: “Because it is messy, chaotic, contradictory, it is a form I frequently return to, especially when I do not always know what and how to say. It is a form which maps and contains my fear.”
The poem is so, so afraid: this is a confession. To be an anarchist means to surrender. To rewrite the manifesto of partnership. To learn there is no correct way to pronounce that word that has made you stutter since you were five.
“Who was it that said living was a procession of steady and then sudden revisions?” – Jenny Xie. To be queer is to be a concentric circle of revisions. Or is it to resist revision altogether?
For the longest time, I was confused between substitute and complementary goods. I guess I didn’t understand how we determined what added value, and what replaced it. I went on to pursue my Bachelor’s in Economics. A discipline that is anything but polyamorous. A catastrophic mistake for a poet.
Indecisive/ Restless/ Disorganised/ Lazy/ Inattentive/ Forgetful – symptoms of ADHD but also words to diminish women. When he asks me to kneel, I do, not because I’m bowing down to him but because I command his release. To be polyamorous is to resist diminishing.
Freedom as an act of willful restraint (Handcuffs not as an object of discipline but of satiation. Erasure of hierarchy. Braiding of politics and sensuality.) Now, take this to the edge of the poem – Form not dictated by content and content not doctored by form.
My partner’s Instagram bio says: “Everything is a remix.” I didn’t know we were talking about the ways in which we used to hold each other. He cannot remember the last time he was aroused by me.
What binds me to the line? If we let the poem pave its way, every enjambment will confound the poet.
Each form serves its unique purpose. We have already talked about couplets. The aubade – a song for lovers parting at dawn, the duplex as an antithesis to political intolerance, the pantoum as a balm for grief. To achieve formlessness, one must first submit to form. Only then can one approach subversion.
Freedom as an act of willful restraint (Forget everything you know) (Kneel) (Ask for permission) (Put handcuffs on the poem. See, how it does not resist?). An antidote to tethering.
“The cento fragments the void, almost already makes the narrative removed, dispossessed again. This is a form of reckoning.” – Malcolm Tariq. Sharp & biting, polyamory not as a way of filling the void but fragmenting it.
To fragment form is to create new meanings that hitherto did not exist. It is to inject lines with cracks of light. What pushes the poet to synthesize? What does light veil and what is revealed? Language as revelation (kink as safety, hybridity as an attempt to uncage the lyric) (This is where we bring back the handcuffs) (Ask the poem if it wants to keep going).
I want my poems to be explosions of light.
There is so much romance in friendships. When I held my third-grade best friend’s hand and grazed my fingers on hers, we were stacking a deck of polyamorous cards. We just didn’t know it yet.
Whenever I write poems for/to/about/on my friends, form begs me to unclasp. It wants to break free or be amalgamated into another or create its own formlessness or a map of blurred boundaries it says fuckyougenrefuckyourulesfuckyoupoet
I now know that writing a poem on friendship is an active act of figuring out where & to whom I belong.
“Caesurae” was one of the first terms I learned in grad school. “Liminality” was the second. To be a woman is to be a caesura. To be a poem is to be liminal. I enter the poem as a way of opening myself to the world. (Unlock the handcuffs, put them away for now) (Practice aftercare).
Every night, I light our Christmas tree. ~~I am lonely~~ It is stiff from loneliness. I do not remember any joy from my childhood.
Relationship as funeral: what is lost is what is lost.
We are tipsy and doe-eyed and we whisper to each other all night and read lines from plays and wake up in the morning retracting – polyamory as erasure (of boundaries).
What I’m trying to say is, ____________ (meaning is yours to make).
My partner and I sing to each other. In our ending, something sprouts elsewhere. Thus, we celebrate. We surrender to namelessness. We suspend every disbelief we ever had. My best friend calls and says all they’ve been thinking about is me. We don’t know what we are to each other anymore, just hands, just skin. We multiply with touch. Inhaling all the names we gave ourselves to get here, we burst.
The poem might be the answer, but I have already moved on to other, more daring curiosities. (Where does form go to die?) (The handcuffs – what is their purpose once the poem is fulfilled?) White space/ Lineation/ Cadence/ [blank] [blank] Experimental [blank] [blank]
If Jericho Brown is right, “A poem is a gesture toward home,” then in freeing the form, I am not returning home. I am collecting twigs. I am attempting to build —

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Salamander, Nashville Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Editorial Assistant at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist and winner of the 2025 Miami Book Fair Poetry Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, and VCCA, among others. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com. Instagram: @shlaghab Twitter: @shlaghaborah