The Drag Queen Dies in New Castle

Returning home
    at twenty-nine, you made
a bed your throne, your
    brothers carrying you
from room to room,

each one in turn holding
    the glass to your lips,
though you were the oldest
    of the brood. Buried
by the barn, you vanished,

but the church women
    bought your wigs
for the Christmas pageant
    that year, your blouses sewn
into a quilt under which

two newlyweds lay,
    skin to skin as if they
carried some sense
    of your undressing. Skirts
swayed where sheep grazed

the plow and the farmer
    reached between legs
to pull out the calf,
    fluid gushing to his feet.
On lines across town,

dresses flapped empty
    over mulch while you
kept putting on your show,
    bones undressing like
it’s never over, throwing

ov your last great shift
    where a fox snake sank
its teeth into a corn
    toad’s back, the whole
field flush with clover.

Bruce Snider is the author of The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and PN Review, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, he is the 2010 writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut.

“The Drag Queen Dies in New Castle” appears in our Spring 2011 issue.