Stevie Edwards:The Joy Project @stevieedwards - Tumblr Blog

The first day I was a girl was in my backyard with my brother picking up brush to burn in a pile and my dad said I had to put a shirt on that summer even though it was hot and my brother was shirtless and I was six or seven and helping clean up the backyard and it was a wooded lot down a long gravel drive and there was nobody to see it but I was a girl in that heat and always would be.

Stevie Edwards, “Girlhood,” published in The Offing (via lifeinpoetry)

lifeinpoetry

I will always be this / quiet storm of blood pulled by the moon toward / the edge of myself.

Stevie Edwards, from “Poem in Which My Student Writes Me to Explain that There Are More of Him, that He Is Not the Only One Who Is Offended by Feminists,” published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal (via lifeinpoetry)

lifeinpoetry

When I wake knee-deep in shipwreck & night-muck, when I am the storm & the storm pummels me, whose lie is that?

— Stevie Edwards, from “Weather Report,” published in Sixth Finch

reecedarlene

Which Witch I’ve Been - Stevie Edwards

Nobody knows my sorrow like the rainbow-haired sandwich artist at the Subway on State Street— not my latest lover whom I won’t bring home to see the groceries I haven’t bought, three weeks musty laundry amassed across bathroom tile, the life I haven’t attended to since October gloomed.

The gray horizon made a witch of me. I said horrible things to the ones I love. Now, who will unbury me?

Each cheap take-out order, a declaration of unbearable without limit: the cracking and whisking of eggs, taking steel wool to the frying pan, all these banalities made Herculean by the slippage between illness and blues. I turn off my phone to lessen the pathos of no one calling to say this too shall pass, like in a good chick flick where the damsel grows into a catalogue posture.

The gray horizon made a witch of me. I said horrible things to the ones I love. Now, who will unbury me?

Nobody knows my sorrow like my sorrow knows the square footage of my apartment, how many steps it takes to pace from one end to the other—the flex of calve and creek of joints, the plodding trudge, its austere territory. I can still circle spots on my body that want to touch the world and be touched.

The gray horizon made a witch of me. I said horrible things to the ones I love. Now, who will unbury me?

buttonpoetry

Safia Elhilo, “Alien Suite” – Check out the full poem here.

lifeinpoetry

Be fire, not this ash slipping through the long fingers of a silent god.

Stevie Edwards, from “Daily Weather,” Humanly (via lifeinpoetry)

bostonpoetryslam

I think my poems are almost always asking the question: What would it look like for this world to love us back?

Franny Choi, interviewed by Stevie Edwards for Ploughshares’ Poet Activist Spotlight (via bostonpoetryslam)

hush-syrup

I’ve never turned into anything I couldn’t talk my way out of.

From The Hippie Church I was Raised in Doesn’t Believe in Sin by Stevie Edwards (via hush-syrup)

mortalpractice

We are old enough to know to be good to our working lungs, our working legs, our working hearts, which have delivered us here, to this beach, this city, this thinning side of happiness.

Stevie Edwards, from “Scheherazade,” published in The Adroit Journal (via mortalpractice)

mortalpractice

The late shift piercer at Tattoo Factory in Uptown asked if I was sober, if I was sure. One beer all night but manic as the lake wind, I’d have taken a dozen fat needles in my face if he and my checking account would’ve approved the only beauty I could believe: something violent and shiny.

—Stevie Edwards, from “Lament with Rhinestones and Wonder,” published in The Adroit Journal