I could slice into the minds
of squirrels with my box cutter;
I could fasten their hind legs
to lukewarm tape recorders,
ignoring their memberships
in the Actors’ Equity,
forcing them to do putty
voiceovers for your cardboard
black box parked just off Wall Street.
DONALD TRUMP AND THE SEMIAQUATIC VIRGIN
Donald had his pixelated terrier face
launch a retirement village
for rinsed-out megaphones.
A spongy duplex with indignant mothballs,
it swarmed with retired sportscasters
peeling off their greasy
lawsuits and hairpieces.
A fire on the lawn melted them into dewy pup diaspora,
beggars scratching on Xmas night.
Donald cut and pasted the Dixie Chicks onto their foreground,
but their greatest relief came when he produced
the Semiaquatic Virgin.
A militia of otter midwives formed a turret around her,
but the men fought to sit like ducks
on her limbic pillows.
My spy at the debacle was the ambulance driver—
if only he could wake up in Donald Trump’s body,
get him to shake out his sleeves to free the Virgin
and all the burritos.
CASTING CALL FOR A NEW IMPERIAL ARCHIVIST
The knobby troll totem proctors this exam.
You must shuttle shampoo to the go-go cages
that restrain our females’ fluffy axons.
You must hose them down for good ol’ picture shows
played on the scrims of freshly-fluorided teeth.
You must clip off the hairy cylinder,
then rewire the preshow newsreel:
use puppets to shroud the cochlear massacre
beneath the skirt of our ermine bell—
can you re-wife her
can you become her master programmer
can you regurgitate a crime monkey with toes un-suckled?
If not, this position will most likely go to an applicant
who overqualified under our parachute.
Katie Hibner is a confetti canon from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, glitterMOB, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, smoking glue gun, and Word for/Word. Katie reads for Salamander and Sixth Finch and is a freshman at Bennington College.