Ask for the definition of love and you expect one answer. Emy G offers fourteen, and they refuse to agree with one another. The title promises a dictionary entry, and the opening, "LoVe / is...", borrows the grammar of one: a word, a verb, then a blank to be filled in. What follows is less a definition than a pile of possibilities, each tugging against the last.
The first answer is a scene: "Hopeless Romantics meeting for the first time." The capital letters turn the phrase into a label, almost a species, and "hopeless" works two ways. It can mean people beyond help, or people with no hope left. Either way, the poem starts at a beginning that is already shadowed. The next line cuts the mood off: "2 legal documents (marriage & divorce)." Candlelight gives way to paperwork. The numeral, the brackets and the ampersand all sound like a form being completed, and pairing marriage with divorce suggests that one contract carries the other inside it. "Between 2 people" then repeats the number in the flattest way possible. After the documents, the people themselves seem small and countable.
The middle of the poem works in opposites. "Something strong / Something weak" is built on the vaguest word available. The speaker never says what the "something" is, only that it can be both. "Only in fairytales" sounds like a shrug of disbelief, and "A signal of hope" answers it at once. A signal is a faint thing, sent from a distance and easily lost, so even the optimism here is cautious. Then comes "Anger and rage," two near-synonyms stacked together as if one word could not hold the feeling. The poem swings from tenderness to fury without a transition, and that lack of cushioning is the point. Love, for this speaker, does not move through moods gently.
The poem's one clear piece of sound-play comes next: "Unbroken / Beakable / Fakeable." Apart from this, there is no regular rhyme or metre, and the lines shrink from the long opening image to single words, so the rhythm speeds up like thoughts rattled off. "Beakable" looks like a slip for "breakable," but even as written it chimes with "Fakeable," and the repeated -able ending gives the passage a clicking momentum. The meaning slides along with the sound. Love begins whole, becomes breakable, and ends up fakeable. The damage moves from something that happens to love to something people do with it.
The ending is the most interesting part. "forever" is the only answer written without a capital letter. Whether by design or accident, it reads as the smallest word in the poem, as if the biggest promise in love were being said under the breath. After it come "Chance" and "Fate," two single words that name rival explanations for why people end up together: accident or destiny. This loops back to the first answer, the Hopeless Romantics "meeting for the first time," since a first meeting is exactly where chance and fate compete. There is no full stop. The definition ends with an open question instead of a conclusion.
The poem matters because it uses a familiar format, the definition, to show that the format fails. Definitions are supposed to fix a meaning in place, but every line here is cancelled or complicated by its neighbour: strong and weak, fairytale and hope, unbroken and breakable. The poem never picks a side between cynicism and idealism. It lets both stand, which feels truer to how most people experience love than any single tidy statement would. The list form also invites the reader to join in. After fourteen answers, it is easy to imagine adding a fifteenth, and that openness makes this short, plainly written poem feel unfinished in a useful way.