The Drag Queen Dies in New Castle Bruce Snider 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.