Valentines: “Oh oh oh We’re on Fire” by K. Iver
Oh oh oh We’re on Fire
Before I knew you loved Bruce Springsteen, I’d listen to “I’m on Fire” and think, he sounds like Missy. His voice had a lower register than yours, but I had no language for gender, queerness, or desire. In 1997, while Jack Halberstam was claiming that masculinity does not belong to men, I was 14. You were 15. Mississippi was everywhere, outside. We had the same socioeconomic status of Springsteen when he was our age. Queer theory was young and not part of Lee County Public Library’s stacks.
If I’d had access to the fast-traveling lexicon of 2023, I’d tell you what I’ve learned about desire. How the body in desire is one in discomfort, prompting it to take action. After leaving Mississippi, I realized we weren’t the only ones afraid to act. Millions of queer people across America were also sitting on bedroom floors inches apart, letting pop ballads speak for them from boomboxes. Millions would remember the onset of erotic longing as tinged with the forbidden and otherness. Shame adds to desire’s intensity. It added to mine.
If you’d lived a little longer, we could talk about our subconscious processing, how we’d watched Springsteen perform hypermasculinity and queerness in movement, dress, and song since before we could form memories. I would jokingly describe that performance as male-to-male trans. I’d say that he talks about his stage persona as emulating his father, a strategy for feeling close to him. He also admits to signaling queerness. In his memoir he writes, “I looked simply…. gay. I probably would have fit right in down on Christopher Street in any one of the leather bars”.
Missy, when I met you, I witnessed a performance more daring, one signaling an energy I couldn’t describe. On a bright and hot morning, you swaggered across our high school courtyard in utility jeans, a t-shirt, a Harley Davidson skull ring on your index finger. Your gold hair was to your shoulders and parted in the middle, styled to look unstyled. When you walked me to class, I felt more protected than I did around cis boys. At 15, your hips somehow looked like a grown man’s. The appeal was not unlike the Born in the USA album cover, Springsteen’s backside in jeans, a white tee, a worn red cap hanging out of the back pocket. The negative space his legs and arms create, the tilt of his butt from a dramatic lean on one leg—it all builds the visual rhetoric of genderqueer activism and celebration.
So, it was natural to feel the electricity of your presence when the radio opened that portal to moody synth and snare drums, to Springsteen’s confession to waking in soaked sheets, in pain: sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull and cut a six-in-valley through the middle of my skull. You spoke to me in similar metaphor: it’s like I’m a chained dog with a steak right in front of me, just out of reach. Because you were not Bruce Springsteen, because your performance of gender was considered deviant, it took me a long time to come closer, to let desire beat dogma. By the time I did, my intensity of longing had grown into a power outside of my control. I was overwhelmed and, at times, immobilized by want. I had no language for addictive desire, only songs by musicians who seemed to get it. I listened to the verse “I got a bad desire” identifying both with forbiddenness of queer pleasure and the pain of wanting too much.
I wish I could tell you this: The pain of wanting too much kept happening, long after your successful attempt at taking your life. Our co-addicted push-pull became a protoype for my most intense relationships to come. Missy, what I’ve let other lovers do to me—that’s the only bad desire.
I used to overidentify with it, thinking the way I loved made me powerful. Everyone I’ve wanted has wanted me back. Everyone I’ve wanted with intensity has wanted me with as much or more intensity. That’s because the people I wanted were dangerous. Could sense my hunger, no matter how subtle I tried to play it, and needed to know more.
This wound that kept reopening—I’m trying to repair it the way Springsteen does. I’m shaping it into poems and essays as a way of ritualizing its release. I’m actively rejecting shame, giving its messages back to the people who needed us to internalize them. I’m performing a gender that’s a little softer than yours and Springsteen’s. But I think of you while rubbing T-gel in my shoulders, while watching for the fat on my face to move. When friends say I’m starting to sound different, you don’t seem far. I think of performance as reaching, as prayer: for feeling androgynous enough, for desire without craving, for slower burns, for you to hear this, tell me I’m headed that way.
About K. Iver
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 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. For more, visit kleeiver.com.