Thrush Poetry Journal
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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).  




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