Here are a pair of romance poems that offer up some too-often unsung qualities of love: the comic, the sinister, the ridiculous. The gestures of courtship in “Billionaire Romance” grow from the mildly threatening to a pitch of absurdity—or do they? In the way the near impossible magnificence of the Taj Mahal was inspired by Shah Jahan’s love for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, is it really a stretch of the imagination to think that one of today’s egomaniacal tech-billionaires might adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after their beloved? or “have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean”? In a 19th century version of "ghosting", “Regency Romance” turns the subject of the love letter into a justification of the letter’s absence. Like a child fabricating to her teacher great tales that explain her missing homework, "Regency Romance" speaks to the often unwanted but always unavoidable responsibilities imposed by the conventions of love.
Chloe Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She was joint winner of the 2016 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, and has been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize. “Billionaire Romance” and “Regency Romance” first appeared in the Spring, 2018 edition of Western Humanities Review, an issue dedicated to contemporary Australian prose poetry.
Billionaire Romance
I will buy a ship and name it after you. I will buy a town and name it after you. I will buy an island and name it after you. I will adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after you.
Everywhere you look: your name in lights, ten feet high, and everyone saying it back to you with a smile on their face.
I will have couturiers dress you and afterwards I will cut off their hands. Your lipstick will be weapons grade, your shoes fashioned from the crash-landed engine of a Soviet rocket.
I will have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean, and if you want to eat the dolphins and turtles bound up in those nets I will have them turned into soup and fricassee and feed them to you from spoons fashioned out of their skeletons. But if you choose to spare them I will train them to eat from your hand. They will purr and rub their faces against you, drowsy with gratitude.
Your fingers will be heavy with glittering rings. But still you’ll stroke those creatures in all the places they like: behind the ear, beneath the jaw, and right between the eyes.
Regency Romance
I would have written but I drank my ink in a fit of thirst. My signature went south on a ship swarmed by pirates; it has only just returned with a rooster and a pig tattooed on the arches of its feet.
I would have written but the jam served with my breakfast turned out to be a clot of blood and to have exited the lung of my sister. It was my duty to bury her. The Turkey carpet turned to quicksand and it was all I could do to haul myself out.
I would have written but the dog caught its own tail and began eating it and the vicar said this was a terrible sign. We attended vespers in a mood of repentance.
I would have written, only the hares and the foxes dug tunnels under this house until the ground could no longer support its weight and it collapsed.
I write to you now from beneath the rubble. I write with the one hand I have been able to extricate; it scribbles to thank you for your patience, for your faith.
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