No one watches when my lover 
picks me up & carries me to a bench, my legs
wrapping his hips. I say 30 years ago we wouldn’t 
get away with this, He says it’s cause I pass. Meaning
I don’t. I’ve opened his sherpa, found his obliques. 
If I climb him, my hips will unpear, my face 
will be sharp and shadeless. If I keep scaling 
my lover, I’ll still want him. It’s late October. 
By the new year I’ll be genderless 
as leaves breaking under his boots.

—

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet from Mississippi. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, TriQuarterly, The Adroit, and elsewhere. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. 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.