Room 376 is a quiet eighth-grade classroom. We have just come back from spring vacation. Suddenly- BAM! The door slams open with such force that the windows shake. In walks, no, in struts a skinny boy, who exclaims: “Hey hey hey homies, it’s me, Michael. I’m the new kid in school.” I have to tell you, from the point of view of a teacher, it is never a good sign when the kids announce themselves. Our aging security guard Mr. […]
Things I’ve been doing differently these days: Fewer adverbs. More suspense. More nose hair monitoring. Less sleep. Not drinking enough water. Way more open discourse with animals on the street than their owners would prefer. And while I’m not exactly proud of this, I’ve been getting my hair cut at a place called SportClips. Sport. Clips. A place for people that love sports so much they’re here to cut their hair off just to prove it. Sport. Clips. Two words […]
Listen. I am eight years old and we are in a rural Iowa town. It is 1990. We have a pretty cool stereo; it has a double tape deck so you can dub tapes, an AM/FM radio, and a turntable that we use to listen to Yellow Submarine. Resting on the floor, attached to the record player, is a set of old speakers. They are covered in about an inch of dust. Written in the dust on the top of […]
I’ve only truly feared for my life once. I was driving from Big Sur to San Francisco with two friends. We decided to stop at a ranch to go horseback riding on the beach. We talked to the stablehand, and were introduced to our horses. “Do you have any riding experience?” he asked. “Sure!” we replied cheerily, because junior high riding lessons totally count, right? I mean, I still knew all the words to En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind” and […]
I’ve called my dad on the phone every Sunday since college. We talk about normal, boring, old man things: the weather, the meals we ate that week, how our respective cars have been running, our cardiovascular health. The only thing that has really changed about our calls in the past couple years has to do with my dad’s housemate, who is usually gone when I call. Each Sunday his housemate volunteers at the aquarium, or as my dad calls it, […]
You Are Okay was read as part of Miss Spoken’s February 2015 show, Penis. You can find Eden at 33:00. After years of working at feminist sex toy stores, you come to see certain patterns of behavior. Heterosexual men who came to the store tended toward a sort of backwards Thunderdome mentality – one dick enters, one dick leaves! You’d see them sizing up the dildos, gripping one to see how it measured up to the “real thing.” They would gaze forlornly at […]
Whenever I read poems somewhere, the first thing I make them say about me is “Erin Watson is a Southern person living in Chicago.” It’s one thing I know. The more I make people say this, the more it becomes an incantation: “A Southern person living in Chicago.” It’s like I never really left, like I can choose to wrap my life around two places. Even if I live here til I die, and I want to, I’ll always be […]
In sixth grade, we had the fear of drugs put into us by a D.A.R.E. officer. His name was Officer Ren and he was the father of one of my classmates. He told us D.A.R.E. stood for Drug Awareness Resistance Education, but locally it also meant Do As Ren Expects. Officer Ren was actually a pretty cool dude, and my whole class really did want him to be proud of us. One definite way that we could let him down […]
My Dad wanted to talk to me privately. It was a Fall Sunday evening in 1964. I was nine years old. This was really important or I was in big trouble. Dad only talked to me alone when he was telling me a bedtime story, driving me to his office on a Saturday morning, or explaining a math problem. We walked into the living room from the kitchen, where Mom cleaned up after dinner. We walked past the kidney-shaped marble […]
