Reasons for Not Getting a Driver's License Until 33

By Stevie Edwards

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It’s hard to explain a life built around avoidance. Any town too small for public transit was too small for my taste in men, women, cocktails, and shouting at starless skies.

Once, my boss at a high ropes course said he didn’t trust me to be in charge of anyone’s life and I was nineteen and good at listening.

Or once, twice, three times a panic attack behind the wheel—my mother going on and on about my cousins and the small sea creatures that kept swimming inside them and screaming out into the air: I am here

and nobody wants to hold me. I imagine we all can translate that prelingual howl. But the traffic lights needed interpreting, and too many horns and blinkers to make sense of what to do with my body and its thirsts and stinks.

Or my father kept saying he didn’t think me capable of learning something so simple my friends, who wouldn’t go to four-year-colleges like me, could do while the night twinkled above us with cheap liquor.

Or I was about to turn sixteen and my father sat slumped at the kitchen table having lost the only decent wage he’d ever earned, and I was too busy learning about unemployment applications and college financial aid.

Or I am always at a party wanting to leave because the men are too old and I am sixteen, and I only came because of the ex-cheerleader I trail behind like a rescue dog who’s just found a human willing to feed it, and I need her to think I am cool,

cool enough to eat lunch with and keep hauling around. And there’s a mountain of Bud Light cans and Smirnoff Ice—bitch beer— for my friend and I. And if I could afford a car, a beater, something embarrassing and rusted but functional, if I could drive away

I wouldn’t have gotten raped, and I don’t know who I’d be. For years I’ve blamed my poor eye-hand coordination and hummingbird heart for trapping me in an apartment I couldn’t leave in a city forty-five minutes from my parents, who I couldn’t, wouldn’t call, because then they’d know what I was up to—

just another hussy like your cousins, I could hear my mother saying. So I stayed and surrendered myself to the bodies that pushed themselves into me. I won’t tell you any more of what happened there. It’s mine.

—

About Stevie Edwards

Edwards holds a PhD in creative writing from University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. Her poems are published and forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, BOAAT, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Clemson University and author of Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). She is the Senior Editor in Book Development at YesYes Books and served as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine from 2010-2020. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her husband and a small herd of rescue pitbulls (Daisy, Tinkerbell, and Peaches).