K. Iver
Missy Asks Me What The 2020s Are Like
More of us are on TV. I have met the trans people who own a bar and a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. I have shaken their hands. An eleven-year-old from my queer youth club says her hobby is trans liberation activism. Some of us still die. More of us want to. Undergrads are performing 90s nostalgia. I saw a freshman carrying a boombox playing Bombastic. For half a second, I thought it was your red Bronco. I saw the stoplight where we danced from our bellies like Shaggy. This is a trauma response. Ford reissued the Bronco last year. The drivers are exactly our age, still flannelled and anxious. Strangers have read poems about you and published them in national journals. Strangers have read poems about you and offered me a fellowship to live in Madison, where I’ve never felt so comfortable around strangers. I climb fake boulders indoors. I’m told the past won’t leave parts of my body. An androgynous climber with many muscles coaches my past up the wall. Trust your big toe. Reach. At a public reading, someone with frosted hair says thank you for bringing Missy to life. When you were alive, I would have gendered them. You would love the lakes here. When I look up from my campus desk, I see sailboats. I hold many people I don’t know responsible for your death. They love us here, now. Right now, they love us here.
a mother’s advice
if you didn’t live in bed if you prayed at all if your laugh wasn’t a bark if you shopped at all if you loved only men didn’t talk about yourself so much if you cared if i cared if when you were on all fours i’d let you crawl over me on hungover mornings if I hadn’t rolled up a newspaper to swat your head as if a fly if infants weren’t infants if you hadn’t thrown up on the drapes if i didn’t need weeks away if men didn’t want so much if men weren’t men if my boss hadn’t chased me around his desk if my father hadn’t chased me around my bed if i didn’t want their want so much if i hadn’t left you so young with my father who didn’t have to chase you to catch you if i felt as pretty as men say if my skirts and suits and earrings and discount designer shoes delivered the fullness they promised if my creditors understood if they hadn’t called you if you hadn’t gone and checked your credit report if your generation weren’t so sad Kelly get up now it’s high noon
K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet from Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, The Adroit, and elsewhere. Iver is the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Fellow for Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University.