Horse Less Press

Old Man Pete

Your mansion is creepy, so you’re creepy.

The little kids hate you like you’re a sled of medicine sans a fluffy Balto:
a stray hair stuck to their lollipops.

Step out from behind their cellophane;
join me between these pillars of salt and ivory—
perhaps a little too matchy-matchy,
but our jelly stingers can determine which is which.

I must ask:
Did those who granted haunted houses such chilling names
think they were being sinister or just ironic at the time?
Perhaps a creepy name becomes a creepy owner becomes a creepy house.

It’s a chicken and egg / trick or treat-injected-with-cyanide
sort of origin story.
 
 

 
 
 
I’m a just a pagan fighting Amazon.com

Talking through my teeth, I argue that my ecstasy is in supplication.

I lead a phalanx of tortoises capped with mandalas.
They excrete valium, spread roots wherever we temple.

We scent out the four horsemen,
the Sabine Women sported on their backs.

Meanwhile, the drone charges Tic Tacs over the Play-Doh land.
The riverbeds are lined with widow breasts
to be liquefied for plushy pills;
they’re sold at the 51^st pharmacy with a god-complex.

Katie Hibner is a confetti canon from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Dead Ink, GlitterMOB, Jerkpoet, Smoking Glue Gun, and Yes, Poetry magazines. She interns for Sixth Finch and Big Lucks, and will be a freshman at Bennington College in the fall of 2015.