Content Warning: Physical Violence or Abuse
Forever, Your Tennessee Girl
We’ve always been a family of scythes
and raconteurs, the best of our hearts sacrificed
to elegy and epitaph. From the very beginning,
I learned to connect song to death. Dadaddy
and raconteurs, the best of our hearts sacrificed
to elegy and epitaph. From the very beginning,
I learned to connect song to death. Dadaddy
was a pastor and a taxidermist; Poppy, a minister
of music and a cremator. Limping past ghost towns
around the South for decades, I was raised by
mother and phantom limb. Now I find myself
displaced from the fabled city of memory. My
history is a landscape I’ve been losing myself to
all my life; I’ll dress it in whatever fictions I deem
necessary to survive. I’ve already told every
story a thousand times over—accepted
huntsmen’s kisses and soliloquized bottle after
bottle of wine to forget the taste. Good news is,
I’m losing faith. I’m getting used to the haste
of disappearance. I’m finally learning to fear
what my mother tolerated instead of craving it.
Estrangement’s an intimate curse—like a dream,
or the past (all lies I’ve learned to narrativize).
I own few truths: my grandpa says umbrella
instead of umbrella, and sometimes he brings
home apple wine in old containers of embalming
fluid if he finishes cremations early. Opening
another bottle, I make dinner in the dark and try
to forget where I am. Someone’s son once held my
life in his hands and looked back into his own eyes
on that small September morning in Nashville.
A musician. He preserved my image in a small
glass enclosure and refused to see what would become
of me—hid away in the woods somewhere, where I
couldn’t reach him. Not all of us are good at
making deals with death. Some narratives are never
resolved; we might as well keep the music going.
About the Author
Spencer Jewell is a writer originally from Nashville, Tennessee. She’s currently the poetry editor for Jeopardy Magazine in Bellingham, Washington. She was a semi-finalist for the 2022 National Student Poets Program and received a National Silver Medal from Scholastic for her series of haikus. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Bluestem, Delta Poetry Review, Poetry South, HamLit, and others. When she’s not writing, she’s usually baking up a storm, looking for lighthouses, hosting a tea party, or sitting by the sea.