Campus Life
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
By Dr. Stevie Edwards
Through my office window
I see a sea of college students
flooding from one brick building
into another, clad with North Face
backpacks and AirPods, listening
to songs I don’t know—some are smiling,
I imagine because the sun has blessed
us all today, their skin kissed
by the UV rays, but not too hard.
I want to tell them to start wearing
a daily moisturizer with SPF,
but I am nobody’s mother.
Some look dazed and bedraggled
like they were studying until 3 am
or dancing. Some of their eyes jump
around, sweet sweatpants-rocking
caffeine fiends with Adderall prescriptions.
Watching their bodies merge
into a roaring river of athleisure wear,
I can almost see myself at nineteen,
a copy of Ulysses in my backpack,
an anthology of lesbian and bisexual
literature, my pink iPod and earbuds
blasting Bright Eyes, my flip phone
and low-rise jeans—who was I
scribbling in notebooks, drinking too much
and kissing boys and drinking too much
and kissing girls and getting A’s (occasionally B’s)
in classes with equations and graphs
and classes with poems I didn’t always
understand but loved to read lying
on a blanket in the quad while my friend
strummed acoustic and I sipped a water bottle
full of cheap white wine and let the words
soak into me, a little like prayers,
while the sun aged me, gently.
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 Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Her next book, The Weather Inside, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2026 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series edited by Patricia Smith. 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.
