claiming to know the tense in which love happens

“claiming to know the tense in which love happens” by Kimberly Reyes is the winner of the 2024 Love & Eros Prize, selected by John Lee Clark. We’re honored to share this intricate poem with you.

“Spinoza defined joy as excess, whatever that is more than. The difficulty in describing romantic love or eros is that it’s already more than, a superfluity. In poetry, it is safest to tell a story or stick with concrete things that may point to the ineffable. Here, though, Kimberly Reyes brilliantly and boldly plunges us into the swirl of the excess of excess. An impossible task, this, made possible by saying that it’s impossible. This poem could have so easily evaporated into mere residue, but its conviviality saves it. A terrific riff over a cup of hot chocolate.” —John Lee Clark, Guest Judge

claiming to know the tense in which love happens

is preposterous once you’ve been there. It’s almost as silly
as someone asking “when did you know,” or “have you said
it
to each other yet,” or “how long have you been together,”
or, better yet, “how long were you together?”
As if answers to any of those questions can reveal anything
but answers about the person asking.

Because of course               the closest thing to the truth
feels like it is always happening and it is still
happening,
and had happened before you met.

And sometimes you just think love is liking someone. Like really liking
someone enough to want to be around them for no reason,
when nothing is happening, when nothing is being said, but you feel
like life is finally happening, even if you are just catching their jawline
and no one else knows why you almost dropped your wine.
Like this is maybe why you are alive? To sit and watch them smile
at a sunset BBQ or look up after turning the last page of a book.
That moment of stillness. That hush—an exquisite extrication
when you’re unaware of any other earthly vibration.

Then also, at its best, love is petty and smelly. It’s pheromones
and the rush of Listerine meeting metal-scarred gums
and mousse and cum-stained jeans and missed classes
and Watchamacallit bars and sweaty palms and always always always
proving what we may be/what we may be still proving
to our 7th grade bullies about being chosen in that way.

But really, you know if someone is/has been in love by how hesitant
they are to kill a ladybug or if they flinch watching anyone
or anything being hurt, even on screen, in a TikTok video,
even if the video is about an ugly moth,
even if the pain is just secondhand, like at a reading, god
at a way too long poetry reading, because love, however fleeting,
is a tapping into a new timeline. It doesn’t always last,
and we don’t all even know that it’s happened,
when it’s happening,
which is the cruelest of all time thefts.