Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco

“When my lover was alive, my touch could unslaughter a calf.” So the speaker of K. Iver’s gripping debut, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, mourns a first love, “a blond boy forced to call / himself a girl” in Mississippi in the 90s. Missy—who signed notes to the speaker as Reese—committed suicide at 27, triggering this elegiac coming of age story, which grapples with a family of origin that includes abusive men and a mother who eschews medication for her child’s mental health, instead calling an exorcist who “waited with / a large hand on my head for a metaphor to take literal shape.” 

In a devastating poem set at Missy’s burial, where no body or accurate pictures of him are visible, the speaker addresses “god” directly: “Lord, in the room of my beloved’s // body, your men won’t admit / the fact of his body.” The speaker imagines Missy alive, dancing in a gay bar, undressing in his barrack, leaning on his red Bronco. In a final punch, after clarifying that “my beloved took your side // in debates about your existence,” the speaker demands god look the beloved in “his new eyes” before choosing to deny him redemption.

The speaker and their beloved are not the only ones who suffer at the hands of violently enforced gender roles. In a moment of compassion for their mother, the speaker laments, “who wouldn’t / love this version of anyone who wouldn’t soften // while watching someone make her first list of everything the world won’t allow.” 

The most beautiful moments in this collection are of celebration, as when the two lovers, kept apart against their will, play the radio on boomboxes over a landline, dancing, without yet knowing, perhaps, that somewhere “Torsos like ours / are touching and strangers watch / only because they’re gorgeous.” What does it mean to hold a person as they were when the rest of the world does not? Or to reach the ages to which they never lived? Iver grapples with these questions in the transcendent metaphors of “Because You Can’t”:

[…] Because you no longer
have a shape, I’ve made a practice of nearness.
A hawk lets me stroke her mid-flight,
I let comets land in my mouth.