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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.� (less)

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 (…more)