ERIN CISNEY // Two Poems

Jamaica Honeymoon

It's been some struggle 
walking barefoot across 
so much beach in the dark,

the suck of sand,
a black surf's deposit 
of broken shell bits 

along its foam edge. 
Still, this drunken 
good humor, everything 

new and made for us, 
no matter how imperfectly, 
ours. I stop to pick 

a cigarette butt from 
between my toes 
and a cat rushes up

unafraid and eager 
to lick dinner's grease 
from our palms. 

It bleeds from a slash 
across one eye, this cat's 
a savage, a fighter.

We walk through wind swept palms
and calls of exotic birds, 
those birds who sleep all day 

and sing all night, such 
beautiful irony. And you
beautiful American, I want you

to buy me sunset daiquiris, 
and white bikinis,
I want you to bruise me 

softly with the blinds open. 
Smuggle that cat home 
howling the whole way.


Votive

That pinprick of empty
a wormhole where your heart was.

I never wanted to be so sentimental
but this moonlit single pillow,

the empty cathedral at midnight
Goddamn, it's like…

It's like memory is a multitude of tiny toads
escaping from underfoot,

Like the clink of tiny claws
in the walls at night.

The past blooms 
on the other side of a keyhole

and I've been turning boys' pockets
inside out

searching for keys.

---

Erin Cisney is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall college and currently resides in Pennsylvania with her husband, two sons and two cats (both coincidentally male as well). In addition to being a poet, wife and mother, she enjoys baseball, horror movies and indie rock. She has been published in Spry.