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.