Katie Hibner 

Fame

In immortality, I’m still nothing 

but a duckling smoked in a saddlebag,

dewy eyes rolling around 

to scope out the entirety of Lake Michigan.

Sometimes the museum resembles a killing floor,

entrapment into one incarnation of cellophane.

They dislocate my shoulder for a kid’s birthday party.

Train wreck spotters flock to me, purple axon beards tingling.

I pray my burlap won’t sag, hot and heavy.

In the mirror, I detect a lozenge plucked from its roseate bowl,

still mourned by an empty nest.

When my family vacationed in Colorado several years ago, my mom bought me a wolf carved from rich, rosy wood. I think I loved it due to my childhood obsession with Balto the sled dog.

Katie Hibner is a confetti canon from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, GlitterMOB, Horse Less Review, Smoking Glue Gun, and Yes, Poetry magazines. She interns for Sixth Finch and Big Lucks, and is a freshman at Bennington College for the 2015-2016 school year.