Poetry / Stevie Edwards

 

:: Upon Failing to Pack Enough Latuda for a Month-Long Writing Residency in Portugal ::

It’s loud in here!      The tambourine tapping to the beat of
				                     Do you remember not remembering
	      the last drunk night? The one that made you
stop drinking?		     How small vole prey you were
	      at the hotel bar, at the liquor store? How lucky
		            you were to survive 
with your pelt intact?
I’m thinking about getting thin	     again
		        and growing out my hair.     It’s our last chance
	to be hot, my friend says on the group chat
		          where I am the only not-mother.
I’m thinking about how weight loss drugs can make 
		        your hair fall out in clumps.     What will I do
	       if I look at the shower drain and there it is?
All my youth and beauty clogging the drain.  I am trying to find 

a cruelty-free tinted moisturizer with sunscreen
			                 to stop the progress of time dragging
	        its talons across my cheeks
		             ethically. There are so many things
	        I cannot stop.  Like the panic-freeze
		                 that seizes me whenever I think of 
a steering wheel, which keeps me 
a pedestrian in this too-fast life.
							                                         And, what if 
my husband gets esophageal cancer
like his father did	      and someone needs to drive him
	           to appointments  	        for chemo or radiation or whatever
and I’m just this dumb dead fish
			                   who can’t do anything but float
on the surface of living?	          Who signed me up	
		                 for all this responsibility?
	   Wasn’t it nice when I used to get lost	 in the night’s hours
		         and nobody expected me anywhere before
			                noon? Puking in the great Ivy League bathrooms
	    before explaining my syllabus to a class at 3 PM
wearing my nice polka dot dress from the thrift store.
		          I used to pick at my hangnails while I lectured
until one day I ran out of the classroom
	      a fountain bursting with blood. 	 I wrapped my thumb
		            in a wad of toilet paper and went on talking
	      about concrete language. 		           Last night my friends poured
		             red wine 	        local from Portugal	   in glass juice 
cups in my living room	        and I could smell it 	    from across 

the coffee table 	                        and wanted to take in its tannins         wanted it to press 
              the pause button	        deep in my cerebrum’s 
gray grooves.	    But I filled my cup with tap water
						                             like the responsible woman
I am supposed to be. 

:: Midsized Meltdown ::

First came the author photos that made me sob
over how puffy my torso looked,
my arms sloppy like the sculptor
hadn’t finished chiseling the muscles.
Then, I asked my love, if I should spend
$250 a month for the new miracle weight loss drug
carving celebrities into skeletons,
and he said yes. What I wanted him to say
was I love your folds and rolls,
the hills you’ve grown in the safety
of this love, how you fill yourself up to the brim
with coconut curries and crispy tofu,
how you aren’t starving, like when you staggered
on a sea of wine for dinner and no bread
to sop-up the storm. And maybe he meant
I should do what I wish with my body
and our shared checking account. But what
I heard was disappear. Become a sliver
of yourself, a woman more worthy
of a glass slipper. Skip supper.
I picture my grandmother with her grapefruit
each morning, which I can’t eat
because they magnify the effects
of antipsychotics. It was the antidepressants,
first Zoloft and then Lexapro,
that ballooned me. I’d been wedding-dress-thin,
and then the pandemic drew heavy drapes
over my joy, and a pill each night opened them
but redrew my edges. Is it wrong to want
an injection that smooths my stomach
and thighs, reshapes me taut and new?

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

 

“Upon Fail­ing to Pack Enough Latu­da for a Month-Long Writ­ing Res­i­den­cy in Por­tu­gal”: Dur­ing the sum­mer of 2025, I had a month-long writ­ing res­i­den­cy with Buin­ho Cre­ative Hub in Messe­jana, Por­tu­gal. While this was a very pro­duc­tive time, toward the end of my res­i­den­cy, I real­ized that I had not packed enough of my bipo­lar med­ica­tion, Latu­da. I had to ration the pills for the last week of the res­i­den­cy, which caused me great men­tal dis­tress, which is chron­i­cled in this poem.

“Mid­sized Melt­down”: This poem is about how my husband’s like­ly well-inten­tioned answer to whether or not I should take a weight loss med­ica­tion caused me to spi­ral as some­body who has dealt with a lot of body image issues since puber­ty. Over the pan­dem­ic, I went on a series of anti­de­pres­sants, which caused me to gain about fifty pounds. I was unhap­py with how I looked but also felt a lot of shame about the prospect of turn­ing to weight loss med­ica­tion. Also, as some­body who wants to believe in body pos­i­tiv­i­ty and believes that bod­ies of all shapes and sizes can be beau­ti­ful, I felt a lot of shame about not being more accept­ing of my own robust body.

Dr. Ste­vie Edwards is an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty and Poet­ry Edi­tor of The South Car­oli­na Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poet­ry, Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, Tri­Quar­ter­ly, The South­ern Review, and else­where. She is the author of The Weath­er Inside (Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas Press, 2026), Qui­et Armor (North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2023), Sad­ness Work­shop (But­ton Poet­ry, 2018), Human­ly (Small Dog­gies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Pub­lish­ing, 2012). She holds a PhD from the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas and an MFA from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty. Orig­i­nal­ly a Michi­gan­der, she now lives in South Car­oli­na with her spouse and a small herd of res­cue pit­bulls. Her work has been sup­port­ed by Ver­mont Stu­dio Cen­ter, Sewa­nee Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence, SAFTA Fire­fly Farms, and Buin­ho Cre­ative Hub.