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Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco
About this book
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 anotherâfrom 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 boyâthe eponymous beloved, Missyâdies 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 griefâone 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."
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraphs
- 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 Belovedâs 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, Missâ
- Jane
- a motherâs advice
- Body Mark
- Who Is This Grief For?
- [Boy] Meets Girl
- Fantasy with No Secrets
- Short Film Starring My Belovedâs Red Bronco
- Fantasy in Which There Was Nothing for Us to Survive
- April 25, 2020
- Boy Meets Them
- Missy Asks Me What the Next Centuryâs Like
- Because You Canât
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors