Only This or That: On Maggie Millner’s “Couplets”
Maggie Millner | Couplets: A Love Story | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | February 2023 | 128 Pages
Hands bound to an IKEA bed frame, incessant vaping, a cat hissing in the face of its former owner, Middlemarch, forever halfway finished, addiction to the feeling of someone’s mouth on yours, floodgates opening up to what was possibly inevitable: a love story.
A woman, whose wandering eye looks inward, the man she thought was the end, and then, suddenly, the woman who was her beginning. This is Couplets, a fictional non-fiction of rhyming couplets and vignettes by poet Maggie Millner. The book, Millner’s debut, is filled with questions of queerness, of kink, of lateness, of loss and gain through the holes left behind, filled by fingers, by obsession as meager as a cup of water next to the bed, so close to spilling.
The New York romance begins like this: a woman, Millner’s speaker or narrator, her semi-fictional ghost, is content but stagnant in a long-term relationship with a boyfriend—a man who epitomizes a modern “good man.” “How bad could / my life really be with people like these in it? / Gentle, loyal, practical, considerate.” He’s the love of her life, she thinks—until she meets a woman whose existence threatens and welcomes a move to the other side she has always considered, but never ventured toward. All her life, she tells us, she clung to things that were safe, like gentle friends; an apartment with the good man; familiarity comfortable like an old shirt.
She finds the woman to be irresistible; a catalyst for a late in life shift to non-monogamy, bondage, arguments the same and new, and roles reversed in gender. The narrator is stunned to find that in a few quick moves, what once felt boring is gone, forbidden by her own volition. Her boyfriend—a good man after all—lets her go after the line of infidelity is crossed, only for her to be left unmasked to the glare of her own desire. Two beliefs live inside of her, one saying that there is contentment in settling, and the other noisily calling for a fire to burn it all down: “I was moved unbelievably / to hold inside me both my lovers / and to introduce them to each other / there, in the hollow just above the heart.” She faces what the good man warns her of: women, and the suffering they cause when they find themselves in love. The narrator takes us through the love affair that changes the bones of her sexuality, identity, and consideration of monogamy, transforming a simple Brooklyn life with a boy and a cat into one of self-discovery, all-consuming love, and suffering. Throughout this book, Millner leans into this binary—the idea that it’s only this or only that—as the fault of exploration. Love and life are the biggest questions we have, and the answers won’t be found here with Millner, but that’s not what we’re asking for. Couplets is not the answer to life’s questions, but rather a snippet of what Millner finds and what she loses. She draws back the curtain on what we almost missed, too.
Millner engages form in a manner akin to classic Romantic poetry, moving to second person in moments of distant clarity. This speaker-narrator’s story comes together at times that make it feel like the crush is not hers but yours, each step towards consummation individual and universal as new love can be. Attempting to stop reading each line feels impossible; the addiction to the hunger and lust of reading is as palpable as that for a lover. Here, we are asked to imagine the inside of a vape pen, and the wishful vision of a new lover comes to the fore:
and imagine that a tiny person lived inside each
cartridge, would sprint to switch
the lightbulb on and fan the fire
when she felt a drag. She must get so tired,
I would think. This elaborate e-cig reverie
was not so different from my theory
of her life—which, because unknown,
was also marvelous and false, complete invention.
It took months to really reach her through the cloud
of myth my adoration made. Until I could,
I lived in fear she’d finally see
my fetish and discrepancy, and flee.
As the crush for the woman deepens into obsession, into love, second-person narration in a prose vignette lets us sit as voyeurs to Millner’s intimacy with her: a space generally reserved for no one but the self looking back at a memory, longing, or regretting:
Then she asked you to share a cab with her; you did; she asked you to walk her in; you did; to get into her bed; you did; to press yourself lengthwise to her; you did; to fall asleep like that; you did; to drink coffee with her when you woke; you did; to kiss her on the mouth; you did; to kiss her with your tongue; you did; to let her touch you once, just to see if you were really as wet as you said you were; you did; to unclasp your bra; you did; to rub yourself against her till you came; you did; to read to her the erotic poem you loved; you did; to remove your pants; you did; to let her taste you; you did; to come again, inside her mouth; you did; to penetrate her gingerly; you did; to get out of bed at last; you did; to go get pizza down the street; you did; to eat it on the sidewalk in the snow; you did; to go back home with her; you did; to sleep there one more night; you did; to stay until the sun came up; you did.
Reading Couplets is invigorating when you thought you knew everything about couplets, and then realize there’s something new to discover in the familiar form. Rhymes move and slide aside to reveal an uncovering; a discovery of fossils, a tomb whose bones are still intact, jewelry in place and shining around the dusty vertebrae.
Embracing rhyme, a quality often forgotten in contemporary poetry, each ending punches, winks. We weren’t too late for anything, we realize. There it was in front of us, Millner shows, as she unfolds her life in a way that makes us wonder what else we’ve overlooked. By writing this way, she lets us live with her in the discomfort of wondering if we are where we’re meant to be. With her boyfriend in his apartment, or out with someone we can’t fully understand; with a self we thought we knew but didn’t really.
When writing about queerness, it’s tempting to say that every journey is different; that coming out can happen at any time of life; that judgment is absent in queer spaces. But as the line between her life before and her life after this moment becomes wider, Millner makes queerness—a concept murky by default—into something of a binary. The sub, the dom, a controller, a listener, the ocean seemingly strong, only to be moved nightly by the moon. The life she begins to share with her new partner is not so unlike her old one, really. There are still walks in Fort Greene, Soylent, and cunnilingus under the down comforter. While the genders of the partners have changed, the narrator’s life remains just as it was. Wherever you go, you are here, you are queer.
The biggest difference in the narrator’s “new” life is simple, really: in her infatuation, the stakes have been raised: It’s the passion and the longing that speak to years of pent up contentment and blissful, monotonous stagnancy. The most joyful parts of the book arrive when Millner momentarily avoids this and that, then and now, and embraces the mess of her life:
There were
these different selves—I need you to see them—
they were shapes made out of lines, and then
one day they all began to cross, the lines,
as if by some obscure design
the analysis of which became the purpose
of my life. Or maybe the pattern was
my life, and its analysis
merely my living.
Love stories always reach an endpoint. Releasing the idea that breakups are pessimistic, and seeing stories as chapters, not books closed, it feels as though Couplets is only the beginning to what will be a long, lustrous life of new ideas for Millner. The narrator of Couplets ends her love affair with the woman who changed everything, but we’ve gained a short book dense with questions unasked and unanswered. Without the stain of our own sweat and effort, we get to move through beginning to end, beginning to end, beginning to end, reminded gently that there is always more to come.
and one night, in another of our desperate fights,
I’d say, You’ve ruined my entire life
and there, suspended in the void between
our mouths, those words I didn’t mean—
but often thought—would linger like a toxin
does before inhaled, admitted, turned infection.
And then, more softly:
it was what I thought in that moment—I am my own husband—
but I couldn’t stop, I felt that way: bonded
to myself by my authority alone.
No one beside me. No one on the phone.
Faced with the most frightening question, “What do I want?,” infatuation and discovery are blown to the side and dust settles. Here you are: vulnerable, starving, exhilarated. Love, Millner says, has been the engine of self-discovery in her life, the propulsive machine pushing towards a move, a change, an epithet you never thought you’d need.
Once the choice is made, and the former self-portrait has been painted over, there’s a feeling of regret for waiting at all. Was I too late? Is the search party gone? This book, a seductive addition to the canon of queer poetry, does the same for couplets, and for the kind of story we’ve lived through but can never fully describe, calling out with what’s not an answer, but an exploration. Changed for the better, Couplets and Millner leave us standing all alone, wrists stained with red marks of rope, wild oats sowed. What’s next?