A Bluff City Blues
January 07, 2026 at 05:43AMAs with many US cities last fall, Memphis became home to an invading force in unmarked vehicles and wraparound sunglasses. The tension was compounded for Marcus Wicker, a poet and professor in the city; not only did the air felt malignantly charged, but he was rocketing toward fatherhood in a way that brought all his emotions to the surface. Amid that turmoil, he and his wife head to an outdoor music festival to do what countless others have done over the last century: lose themselves in the blues.
I’ve got the blues and I don’t, but I do. My wife Emily is seven months pregnant with our first child, a boy. We’ve lost two pregnancies in two years. The sorrow was large, two 2.5-ton elephants crowding our minds, stampeding erratic through our nervous systems at odd hours. And if you’ve shaken my hand, hugged, or spoken to me on a sidewalk in the past few months, I apologize for the shock. I swear my skin is crackling, electrified with a full range of emotions—nerves, recurring grief stones, and a joy I’ve never known and therefore can’t fully explain. But I know that it causes me to break out into spontaneous ad libs all over the house. I walk into the living room, look at the empty corner where we’ve planned to place his Pack ’n Play, and some lighter, sitcom version of me says: “Hang in there, brother!” to the ailing ZZ plant we will have to relocate. It’s a joy that makes me unserious and weepy. But I’m grateful for the lightness. Even when that joy twists into a fit of protective rage as I try not to imagine the throwback cruelty and challenges he may face. My heart is tender, filled with more blood than usual, and every day I’m discovering new valves that wrench on and off as if automated by a third party.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/01/06/a-bluff-city-blues/
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