Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco

- Blurb -

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. "