Love-object wars / not mine

Between and The Aloneness State are companion poems drawn from the forthcoming poetry collection Love-Object Wars / Not Mine, a work in progress. Together, they explore the unstable territory between intimacy and isolation, tracing how the self fractures, withdraws, and slowly reforms in the wake of emotional rupture.

Between inhabits a suspended zone where desire and grief coexist, rendering the body as a site of conflict, vulnerability, and environmental metaphor. The poem moves through images of attachment and devastation, revealing how longing can both sustain and erode the sense of wholeness. The Aloneness State turns inward, mapping solitude as a psychological landscape—neither absence nor void, but a charged and unsettling condition in which boundaries dissolve and identity becomes diffuse.

Rather than presenting solitude as purely negative, the poems approach it as a space of transformation, where disintegration and potential exist side by side. Together, they reflect the collection’s broader engagement with attachment, loss, embodiment, and the subtle, often unseen metamorphoses that unfold under emotional pressure within a wider socio-political climate marked by fragmentation and uncertainty.

The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth.