Julia Watson is a poet from Atlanta, Georgia and coins her poetry as Millennial Southern Gothic. She holds an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from Florida State University. When not writing, she spends her time cooking veggie-lover meals with her old grumpy sidekick, her dog Annie.
Terminal Dinner with a Side of Mac
She told me over mushroom stroganoff that it’s an incurable disease
in which the central nervous system attacks itself. It can be caused
by a multitude of things such as stress but do not worry, my love,
it is not always genetic and at that I ask if she’ll die before I’m thirty.
She shrugs yes and no but thirty is the last birthday until I’m pinning
calendars upside down and counting backwards instead of forwards
so its best she is gone by then anyhow. So we resume our meal as “Dreams”
plays in the background and Stevie Nicks asks me have I any dreams I’d like
to sell. She offered to join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers somewhere
around 1981 but Petty turned her down saying “No Girls Allowed” and Nicks
went on to create Bella Donna and the two remained good friends despite the
rejection. And of course, he is dead long past thirty and Stevie is alive
for now so we clink wine glasses and wash up before my mom ties
her arm with a tourniquet like some heroin addict and injects this medicine
that will not save her tonight or ever so I set my alarm
and dream the way I was told to and in nine years when it rings,
I grab my late mother’s tourniquet and suffocate the clock
until it shatters like thunder
the rain soon follows.
You Ask to Write of Origin and I Present You with Cinder
it is thinning wall it is chipped
furnace it is spiral staircase screaming
with every touch
it is confederate trench it is piss
stains from 1980 it is a Christmas
tree spine hunched
it is nursery it was closet
it is cat and eight litters it is summer
roaches
it is winter possums it is ghost
with rifle it is cries muffled
in dirty washcloth
it is brimming it is barren
and I am only here
to take
and explode.
Mother Weeps
I love when it rains while the sun is shining
and the smell of fountain water on a hot day—
I love her passion, her healing, how
she loves everything and nothing
all at once.
Where I’m from, they say it’s the devil
beating his wife
but I would like to think
she had just heard Beethoven,
his Sonata No.14 “Moonlight,”
and could not help herself.