Do you remember being very young and
coming to understand the world around
you in its language of burning and
goosebumps and bitterness and jitters?
At first, only a few stuttered words—
imprecise instruments that often left you
clambering in screaming frustration?

In those beginning moments, did you ever
reach out to tug on a loved one’s sleeve,
asking them: what does that mean?
And then did you say and scream those first
blunt words until they grew heavy and wore
down the wordless imprints that came
before?
What texts, then, started to appear in your
life?
Did you ever have to learn a poem or a
story or a ceremony, to recite it word for
word, maybe before you knew what it all
meant?
How much of you is made from language?
Can we make a new text together now—
one that tells a truth?
Or would these words just bounce around,
dipping themselves in the histories and
cultures that tie them all together in
double-meanings and symbols until we’re
just lost in references to references to
references?
Is there any other way to speak?
What if we took these substitutions and
slippages and made them our medium?
Where do we begin?
If I look at green and you look at green, are
we seeing the same thing?
Is your green anything like my green in the

story about my grandmother and the out-
of-control green car and how now I drive its

negative, a red car?
Can we still talk about green if this is what I

am seeing, and now I am thinking of loss
and I am thinking of family and I am
thinking of love because all these things can
be green?
Who first taught you ‘love’?
When I asked, did you think of the word, a
different word, the concept, a different
concept, the person, a different person?
How much of love is made of language?
Did you ever quote a text to a person you
love, and then hear them recite it back to
you, like a story or a poem or a memory or
a promise?
Did you find yourself wishing you could go
back to that wordless place made of
burning and goosebumps and bitterness
and jitters?
What if we keep playing this game until you
find something you like, and then you stop?

This text exists alongside Love Is, an interactive
digital poem that explores the slippages and hidden
associations in language and culture. The reader is
invited to author and re-author the famous Bible
quote ‘Love is patient, love is kind’ until they find
something that speaks to them.
Synonyms taken from the ‘synonym:’ function on
Google, sourced from Oxford.