Poet of the Year
SYDNEY MAYES
Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, Gulf Coast Journal, Denver Quarterly, Poets.org and Prairie Schooner, among other publications. Executive Editor of Nashville Review and a finalist for the 2024 Furious Flower Prize, Mayes can be found on Instagram: @sydney_gabrielle_mayes
You make your living pickpocketing raven feathers from skyscraper window seals and / husking pistachios with saxophonist’s tongue—talking / about you’re on god’s timing, going on about / how you’ve got plans to spit a shell so far into the dark / it’ll come back scorched and dictating the standards of a new jazz.
Since I was old enough to form coherent sentences, I’ve been working. As a child I would help my mom out at the front desk of her salon, at fourteen I worked at the Denver Zoo, in undergrad there was a point where I held three jobs, and so on and so forth. The same is true for everyone in my family, they’ve been at work their entire lives. It is just me writing what I know. What I know is work, what I know is money as finite, as a barrier to entry.
August 26, 2024