"Fall in love" is such a familiar phrase that we have stopped hearing the verb in it. Brittany Allen's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, makes us hear it again. Its speaker begins with a list of fears, discovers that one of them has already come true, and ends by realizing that the real danger lay somewhere else.
The first stanza is a list that slowly changes meaning. Each line repeats the same frame ("a fear of falling, / a fear for falling in love, / a fear of falling from a height, / a fear of flying"), but "falling" shifts from the general to the romantic to the physical. The preposition wobbles too, from "fear of" to "fear for," as if the speaker cannot decide whether love is something to dread or something to worry over. Whether deliberate or not, the slip suits a poem about losing balance. The stanza closes on its longest line, "thousands of feet above the ground," which stretches out the way a drop would.
Then comes the pivot: "but let me tell you something.." The double full stop and the confiding tone make the poem sound spoken, as if the speaker has leaned in close. What follows undoes the opening. The speaker has fallen after all, and love arrives as water: "I was hit with a wave." It is something that happens to you. The next line stammers, "a wave, an urge to fall," repeating the noun as if the speaker is still catching their breath. Then the language sharpens to "further and harder." The speaker is no longer swept along. The fall has become a wish.
The third stanza reverses the poem's direction. "I wanted to fly" turns the most feared act into the way to reach the beloved. Falling and flying point opposite ways, but both mean leaving the ground, and the poem uses that kinship. The repeated "I wanted" pushes the stanza forward, and "break through the clouds and break through the distance" doubles its verb to join two meanings. Clouds are what a plane passes through, and distance is what the journey is for. The ask is oddly small: "only a night with you; that alone would be enough." The trailing ellipsis lets the thought fade rather than finish.
The fourth stanza brings the longing down to human scale: "half a world between your hand and mine." Hands are small and intimate, and the phrase sets them against a whole planet. The next line is the strangest and most revealing: "I do not know what you smell like or what you feel like but I don't care." Judging by this, the two have never met in person. The senses love usually leans on are missing, and the final stanza answers that gap. "I didn't fall in love with that," the speaker says, naming instead a smile, a way of speaking, a laugh. These are things that can reach across a distance.
The closing lines also work through tense. The poem opens with "I have a fear" and slips into "I had a fear" in the fourth stanza. At the end it says "I thought my biggest fear was falling but it isn't, / my biggest fear is losing you." The past tense is the old fear, and the present tense holds the new one. The word "fear" keeps returning, so the poem reads less as a story of becoming fearless than as a re-ranking. The speaker is still afraid but now knows which fear matters most.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from repetition and from lines that run long and breathless, then stop short ("I wanted to fly"). The uneven capitalization and punctuation make it feel unpolished, like thoughts caught as they come, which suits a speaker who has been caught off guard.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a worn idiom and follows it to its logical end. The fear shifts from the speaker's own body falling to the other person slipping away, and that shift is the poem's central idea. Its courage comes from the speaker deciding what is worth being afraid for.