Campus Mirages
Below the dorm window, courtyard guffawing
and cigarette smoke whirl,
creating a tornado of camaraderie
wafting around your twin-sized bed.
Everyone else has it figured out.
Everyone has made friends.
Something is wrong
with you.
But here’s the thing:
You don’t see any other students
sitting in their rooms by themselves on a Friday night
because they are sitting in their rooms by themselves on a Friday night.
Your suitemates won’t be in your wedding party.
They will just be the people who left clumps of hair
around the shower drain for eight months.
The long-distance, codependent couple
who video chat for hours in the laundry room
will break up over Thanksgiving weekend.
The loudmouths in your English class
talking over the professor’s lecture
only think they are going to Law School.
The artsy girl with piercings and purple hair
is also pretending to read in the dining hall,
while she eats her lunch alone.
Loneliness is a drought of reassurance,
and adjusting isn’t an absence of misery.
Justine Defever currently resides in Michigan and is an Associate Professor of English and Communications at Cleary University. Her poetry has been recently featured in Poets’ Choice, Sad Girls Club Literary Blog, Silent Spark Press, and Wingless Dreamer. In addition to her publication schedule, Justine placed in the 2022 Ekphrastic Poetry Contest at the Muskegon Museum of Art. During July 2022, Justine completed a residency in Edinburgh, Scotland while finishing an MFA in Creative Writing at Arcadia University.