Boombox Ode: Enjoy the Silence

K. Iver

A landline lets me dance with you.                 My one-deck and your two-deckare dialed to 98.5 FM without                 an echo. If we speak aloudthis miracle of fiber wire                 and radio wave, harmonycould split. From our speakers:                 soft synth, a baseline, a choirreverbing, a guitar riff that rises                 and falls, asks and answers. I can’tsee your movement, the bedroom                 you’re quiet in. Somewhere, bodieslike ours are pulsing under the same                 pink neon to the same wordslike violence, break—Torsos like ours                 are touching and strangers watchonly because they’re gorgeous.                 Let me pretend you’re back in mybedroom, before my mother found us.                 You’ve risen from the pine floorand pulled me up. You want me                 to stand for this. Let me pretendall I’ve ever wanted, all I’ve ever needed                 is here. Tell me that’ll be us. Soon.

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K. Iver (they/them) is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions selected by Tyehimba Jess. Short Film won the Wisconsin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the L.A. Times Book Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, The L.A. Review of Books, and elsewhere. Iver has received fellowships from The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University.

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Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco
Milkweed Editions
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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.

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.”

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