Fanny Howe builds the poem as a list of five basic verbs: to eat, to sleep, to want, to kill, and to love. Each one gets a burst of word association. She slides between languages, nursery rhymes, baby noises and slang, so the verbs feel like things a child learns first, before grown-up meaning settles in. Eating becomes "milk is to eat what water is to bleed," while wanting is "to fall without wings."
The mood shifts as it goes. The early sections are playful and sing-song, but hunger, loss and anger keep pushing through, especially in the lines about being "mad at mama, mad at dad." Then love arrives, and the first four verbs get shuffled together, as if love is made of all of them and can't be separated from them.
The ending is the surprise. Instead of a definition full of big feeling, love is plain effort: hugging your luggage through a blizzard to earn bread and feed someone. The poem suggests love is something you do, and it costs you.