Stevie Edwards
Ode to Effexor
Feelings buzz before me like insects
I could swat out of the sky.
Eight years ago at a bar, my neighbor said,
Your problem is that you feel things
too much. He was right. I was on the wrong
dose of meds or I was off meds, I forget,
but I couldn’t get over so many aches–
how the woman I wanted to wake next to
stopped wanting to wake next to me, wouldn’t say
girlfriend even though I had a toothbrush
in her bathroom. Or maybe it was the man
who followed me home from the bar
the night before the semester started
when I calmed my first-day teaching nerves
with too much whiskey. How I kept seeing him
out the corner of my eye. Now
I can remember my history of feelings–
I have a long record of heartbreak
and fear, but I can’t feel them
in the part of me that feels things,
that deep inner sob place has a fence built
around its edges. I cannot reach how it feels
to miss a lover’s messy hair in the morning.
There are costs no one tells you about
when they think you’re going nuts, and they want
to staple you into your body
before you jump out of it
into traffic. The cost is heaven, the cost is
hell. I pay all my bills on time.
Stevie Edwards’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Edwards is the author of poetry collections Quiet Armor (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press, October 2023), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012), as well as chapbook Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018).
Return to July 2023 Edition
Feelings buzz before me like insects
I could swat out of the sky.
Eight years ago at a bar, my neighbor said,
Your problem is that you feel things
too much. He was right. I was on the wrong
dose of meds or I was off meds, I forget,
but I couldn’t get over so many aches–
how the woman I wanted to wake next to
stopped wanting to wake next to me, wouldn’t say
girlfriend even though I had a toothbrush
in her bathroom. Or maybe it was the man
who followed me home from the bar
the night before the semester started
when I calmed my first-day teaching nerves
with too much whiskey. How I kept seeing him
out the corner of my eye. Now
I can remember my history of feelings–
I have a long record of heartbreak
and fear, but I can’t feel them
in the part of me that feels things,
that deep inner sob place has a fence built
around its edges. I cannot reach how it feels
to miss a lover’s messy hair in the morning.
There are costs no one tells you about
when they think you’re going nuts, and they want
to staple you into your body
before you jump out of it
into traffic. The cost is heaven, the cost is
hell. I pay all my bills on time.
Stevie Edwards’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Edwards is the author of poetry collections Quiet Armor (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press, October 2023), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012), as well as chapbook Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018).
Return to July 2023 Edition