THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS: KATIE HIBNER

THREE POEMS:

Cyborg PTA

after Bhanu Kapil

At our last meeting, we unashamedly parked on ampersands, played “Would you rather?” between spoonfuls of popped-cherry juice and rounds of pinochle (the top question was, “Beagle mother with cyborg fetus or cyborg whale with ‘legit’ fetus?”). We voted to raise funds for an Arctic field trip for the thermally-enhanced sixth graders, to protest the recent ruling against affirmative action for the mechanically-dependent. Google Glasses agreed to supply coffee and his homemade pizzelles for the next meeting. We finished by drafting ideas for our next Memorial Day parade float: to enrich all of the kids’ multiplayer cortexes, I wanted a friendly wagon of eiderdown studded with our magenta flags. The WWIII veterans called me a beta blocker, advocating instead for a whet mausoleum dragged batty with their apparitional appendages. The majority agreed, so there was no time for ctrl+alt+delete. Now we might as well install a duck blind to watch the hindsight in the gloaming. 

Iguana Madonna

An iguana is our Madonna. One day, she was a trowel floating through our foreground, scraping us out of pelts sticky with detergent. The next, she had a kidney tumor.

It was elliptical, tangy, vampiric. We wrestled our despair into butterballs. The coast elasticized, fringed with the raw stubs of our axons. 

A hunk of the old fatherland reared up from the tide, sepia blaring out his sidebars. I breaded him, but he still demanded an ultrasound of our mother’s legitimacy, and while I initially avoided mentioning my Oedipus complex, I realized I would end up projecting it onto my washcloth anyway. 

So: I flung my longest ribs at him; I netted him in my hairiness. The hunk trembled back to the waves, gradually muddying into a memo. 

Our Madonna glowed from her nest of roseate scarps. You all asked me to pose on her lap for a Pietà.

 Mole

We’re all a cast of Kafkaesque moppets. I’m a radically-ancillary groundhog. You’re a buttoned-up wolfie hiding amongst the smoked-out labor unions. They codify their gestures for colloquiums flavored with real sea-salt, tired of wind milling their proboscises for emphasis. The union's mascots chalk them back into splotchy business school, package and peppermint their bailouts. In turn, the members spoon them up some whey proteins before they’re spray-dried for shake mix, dab up the orgone dribbling from their bosses’ wingtips. 

You paw through headquarters for me, dragging back the execs. I gnaw open the corsets around their through lines, carve pine boxes for them all.

*****

Katie Hibner’s poetry has been published by  Bone Bouquet, inter|rupture, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Vinyl,  and Yalobusha Review. She has read for Bennington Review, Salamander, and Sixth Finch. Katie dedicates all her poetry to the memory of her mother and best friend, Laurie.