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58 pages

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Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.

In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.

“I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.”

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.”

Sujets

Love

Erotica

Poetry

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Themes

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Publié par	Milkweed Editions
Date de parution	10 janvier 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781639550616
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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SHORT FILM STARRING MY BELOVED’S RED BRONCO
poems
K. IVER
MILKWEED EDITIONS
© 2023, Text by K. Iver
© 2023, Cover art by Pace Taylor
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
milkweed.org
Published 2023 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover illustration by Pace Taylor
Author photo by Brooke Opie
23 24 25 26 27 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Iver, K., author.
Title: Short film starring my beloved’s red Bronco : poems / K. Iver.
Other titles: Short film starring my beloved’s red Bronco (Compilation)
Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2023. | Summary: “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022036848 (print) | LCCN 2022036849 (ebook) | ISBN 9781639550609 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781639550616 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3609.V46 S56 2023 (print) | LCC PS3609.V46 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23/eng/20220822
LC record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022036848
LC ebook record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022036849
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
For Missy
April 24, 1981–July 4, 2007
Contents Nostalgia For Missy Who Never Got His New Name Family of Origin Content Warning Tupelo, MS Boombox Ode: Enjoy the Silence A Medium Performs Your Visit fifth position (intrusive thoughts at ballet camp) Missy, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body Anti Elegy 1987 Second Position (Home Practice) Gospel for Missy During Our Three-Day Birthday Season Sleeping Beauty New Testament Fairy Tale Prologue Family of Origin Rewrite god Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss— Jane a mother’s advice Body Mark Who Is This Grief For? [Boy] Meets Girl Fantasy with No Secrets Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco Fantasy in Which There Was Nothing for Us to Survive April 25, 2020 Boy Meets Them Missy Asks Me What the Next Century’s Like Because You Can’t Notes Acknowledgments
“There must be a girl, there has always been a girl. There must be a boy, there has always been a boy.… There must be a ghost. They must be hungry.”
—OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
“How should I greet thee?—”
—LORD BYRON
Nostalgia
In the beginning, yes, a garden. As lush as you’re imagining. Even the grass grows mid-oak. In the beginning, the grass and trees and birds are already tired of their assigned names. They consider rebellion. The green blades think of rounding, feathered wings dream of swimming a backstroke, but someone assigned “woman” beats them to it by eating something edible. In the beginning, in a hospital in north Mississippi, a mother holds her new baby, calls this day her happiest. The baby is you. The mother is surprised you’re here with only a heart murmur. She says having lived through her bloodstream’s birth control and, later, tequila, you must be a fighter. In the beginning, there’s much holding. There’s not enough holding. In the beginning, a father says you’re beautiful because you are. In the beginning, you’re three years old and crying too loud on the beach because a surprise wave knocked you down and the salt won’t leave your mouth. The salt won’t leave your eyes, your hands, each fingerprint. In the beginning, while you’re still walking down the shore, still crying, a father slaps you on the thigh. Hard. You stop crying in your purple one-piece. Here, a beginning: a small house on a wooded hill where dogwoods bloom when they’re supposed to. If you’re wondering what the cardinals would do for you besides moving bright color around, you’re twelve. If you’re wondering what parts of life are survivable, you’re fourteen. There, the beginning, a boy, fully clothed in flannel and denim. He tells you, only you, that he’s a boy. You understand. He knows nothing of your uncertainty about lip gloss, what makes you a girl. He might not understand. In the beginning, he looks at you the way someone must have when you were born. Here, in the forest, a ripeness both of you can eat but somehow shouldn’t. A fruit bored with sinless afternoons and aching for teeth.
For Missy Who Never Got His New Name
I hear the stars are sentient. Which gives
me hope for the nitrogen feeding your grass.
Even more for the mole ending the day’s
burrow in your skull. I’m told your atoms
are still atoms. Somewhere you’re sitting
by a pool picking apart the physics
of swimming. In the hallway of a large
high school in Mississippi, you’re again
the sophomore guarding my classroom
entrance with a letter, like an undiscovered
prince. I’ve resumed my surprise at desire
I thought for cave dwellers.
This is where I go wrong. I loved a body
you didn’t. My younger self wants the word
to rebuild, rather than stop at the blond hair,
middle part, low ponytail, the impressive
manliness with which your hips carried
utility denim. I tell my young self to flatten
her memory’s landscape. Picture two scars
liberating a torso. A first name that doesn’t hiss.
Soon, a Brooklyn apartment. We pretend
it finally happened for you. It really did.
Family of Origin Content Warning
Detailed descriptions of a father’s brutality.
Graphic images of a boy, dreaming
about food at night, his stolen
transistor radio spilling James Brown’s
good, good lovin’ over his pillow. This poem
may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence
toward a wife. May run time in a circle.
May reveal the husband’s plush
red hands abbreviating his wife’s neck
on a crisp November afternoon, their child
watching from the porch. The husband
is my father. Is the dreaming boy. The wife
is my mother. Sometimes, she forgets.
Sometimes she thinks she’s ten again,
watching her bedroom door, afraid
her father will turn the brass knob.
That was decades ago. He must’ve stopped.
This poem may mention sexual abuse
in the abstract. This poem doesn’t know
why it must tell you. It wants you
to resist brightsiding its tragedies.
It’s tired of hearing that everything
worked out, didn’t it? Tired of hearing
the mother loved the child. So much.
Everyone says so. Everyone who knows
that, on an April weekend, the mother
left me, the child, in her very first bedroom
whose door opened—while the child slept—
to a grandfather’s outline. Don’t think
this poem wants to stay in that bedroom.
It wants to swaddle the impossible
contours of joy. It’s tired of hearing
joy is possible. It wants joy.