Nashville, Tennessee by Sydney Mayes
" this is not the south you were promised: marigolds, big and batwinged"
Nashville, Tennessee
by Sydney Mayes
you have to forgive
the snow for its
waking. ideally, you
occupy a land. you
are accommodated. you
are private school
broad, shouldering
the quiver of a pollen
weighty spring. instead, you
occupy an apartment. you
are a tenant. you
are watching hived frost
slip through unsealed
window slits and sting
your sore thumbs blue. you
are fused to the mud, you
are dodging silverfish.
you are too broke
to buy space heater.
this is not the south you were promised:
marigolds, big and batwinged
off of yam-sun, blushing your neighbors’
lawns, taro ichor leaking from your nostrils.
it is january seventh, radnor lake grey
and heronless. snow webs white the orchid
lounge awnings. wind delivers a cold
that coagulates your blood to tubers.
the city, saltless, shuts down.
at the start of the week you bronzed
your wrists on bike handles,
thanked for shade the copses of trees
that keep the barred owls company.
you unnotched yourself from the palm
long icicles, the rockies’ paleozoic udders
that nourished you, in the name of sun
gorged skies. but the weather erupts,
unravels, unfurls the cartilage keeping
magnolia bloom bonded
to otherwise unimpressive bark.
This will be the most docile winter
of the rest of your life.
Soon, your grease sweet scalp
will gulp a warm hibernal rain.
First published in ONLY POEMS, 2024.
The poem reads like someone trying to reconcile the South they imagined with the South they actually found themselves living in. It captures that feeling of expecting warmth, color, and ease, only to end up freezing in a drafty apartment, broke, watching winter seep through the cracks. The repetition of “you occupy” makes the sense of displacement feel even sharper, as if the life they pictured is happening somewhere else entirely. The small details silverfish, sore thumbs turning blue, the city shutting down give the disappointment a very real, lived texture. The promised South, full of marigolds and sun, feels almost mythical compared to the grey, empty lake in front of them. There’s a quiet sadness in remembering the Rockies, the place they left behind for skies that were supposed to be brighter. And yet, the poem ends with a kind of acceptance: this winter is harsh, but it won’t break them. Soon the cold will soften, and they’ll learn to live inside this new version of home.
Ah this is so incredibly rich. The line "last week you bronzed your wrists on bike handles"!