Image: Kenneth ElDot Jay

Editor’s Note: K. Iver was a finalist for Boston Review’s 2019 Annual Poetry Contest .

For Missy Who Never Got His New Name I hear the stars are sentient. Which gives me hope for the nitrogen feeding your grass. Even more for the mole ending the day’s burrow in your skull. I’m told your atoms are still atoms. Somewhere you’re sitting by a pool picking apart the physics of swimming. In the hallway of a large high school in Mississippi, you’ve resumed the sophomore guarding my classroom entrance with a letter, like an undiscovered prince. I’ve resumed my surprise at desire I thought was for cave dwellers. This is where I go wrong. I loved a body you didn’t. My younger self wants the word to rebuild, rather than stop at the blond hair, middle part, low ponytail, the impressive manliness with which your hips carried utility denim. I tell my young self to flatten her memory’s landscape. Picture two scars liberating a torso. A first name that doesn’t hiss. Soon, a Brooklyn apartment. We pretend it finally happened for you. It really did.

Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss

July 2007

I drive from the graveside to my apartment,

59 miles from your body. Your villain has yet

to go public. She’s larger than the highway.

She says to keep your name quiet and I bury

each holy letter in the undergalaxy

of dreams. In the car, I scream for a raccoon

failing to lift his own body with his tail. A grief

more bearable than getting lost in the dual

image of you squatting in the gym one day

and dangling from a light fixture the next.

At home I begin playing videos of a cow

weeping for her child who’s left the pasture

to become veal. I think maybe their villain

is the grass in their bellies.

In my dreams you call from the decade-old

landline that held our breaths until 3 a.m.

There, I can see you leaning on the blue wall,

saying you’re alive and so sorry. In the daylight,

I drive an earless cat home from the highway,

juggle this new obsession with nonhumans

alongside the old obsession with women and men

who insist on my wanting them until I do.

I do not believe you are here now and so sorry.

I believe the soreness of each woman

you collected is worth your warm, aboveground

body collecting more women.

That is to say I am inconsolable.

Every day a new definition

of inconsolable. Yesterday: I have a body

and you don’t. Today: your villain is a place.

Look, I tell her, how evenly you flatten a face.