Family of Origin Content Warning by K. Iver
Family of Origin Content Warning
K. IverDetailed descriptions of a father’s brutality.
Graphic images of a boy, dreaming
about food at night, his stolen
transistor radio spilling James Brown’s
good, good lovin’ over his pillow. This poem
may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence
toward a wife. May run time in a circle.
May reveal the husband’s plush
red hands abbreviating his wife’s neck
on a crisp November afternoon, their child
watching from the porch. The husband
is my father. Is the dreaming boy. The wife
is my mother. Sometimes, she forgets.
Sometimes she thinks she’s ten again,
watching her bedroom door, afraid
her father will turn the brass knob.
That was decades ago. He must’ve stopped.
This poem may mention sexual abuse
in the abstract. This poem doesn’t know
why it must tell you. It wants you
to resist brightsiding its tragedies.
It’s tired of hearing that everything
worked out, didn’t it? Tired of hearing
the mother loved the child. So much.
Everyone says so. Everyone who knows
that, on an April weekend, the mother
left me, the child, in her very first bedroom
whose door opened—while the child slept—
to a grandfather’s outline. Don’t think
this poem wants to stay in that bedroom.
It wants to swaddle the impossible
contours of joy. It’s tired of hearing
joy is possible. It wants joy.
SELECTED BY WILLIAM FARGASON
K. Iver’s debut Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco explores both the speaker’s trans identity and the loss of a trans lover and best friend. The book becomes an extended elegy. The poem “Family of Origin Content Warning” looks at abuse acutely, directly, for what it is and for all of its horrors. But the most powerful part about this poem is its ending—its urgency to try as hard as one can to move away from that pain and that loss into joy. The arc of this book, and the argument of this poem, shows that despite the loss, despite the abuse, and despite the constant threat to trans people simply existing, that in the face of all of this there is not just the possibility but the actuality of a place of acceptance, safety, and ultimately, joy.
ABOUT WILLIAM FARGASON
William Fargason is the author of Velvet (Northwestern University Press, 2024) and Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. He lives with himself in College Park, Maryland.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco by K. Iver, published by Milkweed Editions, 2023. (Available direct from Milkweed Editions • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“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.”” (Source)
ABOUT K. IVER
K. Iver was born in Mississippi and has a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. Their debut collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco (Milkweed Editions, 2023) won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. The collection was also named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver is the Roger F. Murray Chair in… (more)
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 49 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: trauma • memory • longing • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
