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 […]
Try as she might, the nurse’s aide could not yank out the foley. A foley is essentially a hose attached to the patient’s penis that allows him to pee without getting out of bed. At first she worked with delicacy and precision, and then she worked with force. She was getting frustrated. Medication had numbed me, so I didn’t feel anything. After a while she went to get the nurse. The nurse followed the same routine, first trying to ease […]
Dear Maria, I like you a lot, a whole lot. I want you to be my girlfriend. I’ll be the best boyfriend ever. Even though we are both only in the 5th grade, we would make a great couple forever. I promise to never ever hurt cheat on you or hurt you. For real!! Think about it, and pick yes or no. My Dad says maybe is for cowards. Love Always, Me PS. When you say yes, I’m going to […]
Cold scratches at my face as I slowly peal the blankets to look through an open space. The deep men’s voices on the other side of the wall are pitching louder and angrier. Muffled threats. A thud against the door. One of the men laughs. The other gets louder. Mental calculations click down in my head. Ten steps to the door—three seconds tops. Run across the cement floor, heave the door open, and fly past them. Quickly, so they won’t have time […]
The first time I smoked crack was an accident. I was 20 years old, living with my mom in an unremarkable eight-story building in the suburbs. We lived on the seventh floor, and Carmen lived on five. She had just turned 40, and she was short, energetic and sexy. At least, she was sexy to 20-year-old me. Today, I’d see her low-cut tops and long fingernails as tacky, but at the time, I couldn’t see past her big boobs. When […]
