September 19, 2016 | Occasus | Issue 6 | Poetry
2 Poems by Erica McKeen:
A Tea Party at the Cemetery
Drugged women around me, too old to laugh
Nodding and losing their teeth in the grass The trees are bent watching, breaking their backs Choking up acorns and calling us freaks Freaks in the grass, they laugh and they laugh The trees they sprout molars and chatter and clack Crack in my back, I’m breaking in half The women are watching and melting their skin In the sun on the hill, it spills on the grass The teapot is cracking, we’ve spilled every drop We’ve spilled every drop It was filled to the top The teapot has cracked, I can’t get it to stop. |
While Studying Spanish on a Monday Night
I thrash in the gap
between making love to language with him and making love to him. My bed sheets never were so fluent, their little mouths nipping and licking, reciting poetry, laughing, making Spanish jokes about Bukowski and how he commands—the imperative. But if I want to wish, he says, we’ll fuck with the subjunctive, with Plath who put her head in an oven because her husband had offspring with his words, not hers. She left a stack of paper on the desk about Nazis and children. If it were me, mine would be of sex, of you a man in bed, mute and writhing, Bukowski broken and benign, stripped with a pen. I shrug in response, “It would take a suicide to let you in.” |
ERICA MCKEEN is a third year student at Western. She was previously completing an Honors Specialization in Creative Writing and English Language Literature, but recently decided to take a less restrictive and altogether more dangerous route: art without an academic degree behind it. Her short story, "Our Eyes, Our Tongue," won the 2016 Lillian Kroll prize in creative writing, and her work has been previously published in Shirley Magazine, Minola Review, Green Blotter, The Voices Project, The Quilliad, This Dark Matter, Nom de Plume, and the fourth and fifth issues of Occasus.