Americana Stories—Poetry

Two Poems by KateLynn Hibbard

Decompensating

Little pings of rain on the window, cold, grey sky,
autumn coming.  Now the rain gathers speed,
momentum, camaraderie,
a social movement of rain, we hurry
to get out of the rain as though
we don’t know what it is to be wet.
Morning gets darker and the streetlights
come back on and today has been postponed
due to lack of sunlight.

In the distance, some sort of beeping,
a quiet neighborhood on a rainy morning, sirens
a few blocks away, cars driving
too fast, revving up the street to the Holiday Station,
and what genius thought to name it that? There is nothing
celebratory about it, but neither
is it as glum as it could be, with so many kinds
of candy and soda and chips and cookies and
cigarettes, motor oil and ice cream
and that weird little section of kitchen necessities like ketchup
and canned corn, sometimes the odd piece
of fresh fruit but by and large
donuts win the day, those sad hot dogs
spinning lonely in their hot dog bin,
pizza and energy drinks, batteries, greeting cards,
aspirin and lip balm and toilet paper,
all attesting to a love of convenience, which means speed,
which costs more at a convenience store
but it is certainly convenient to eat things
that for the most part don’t require a lot of chewing.

Now a bell rings, not the bright ding
of chimes but rather the sound you might hear
on an airplane, two tones close together, signaling
that you or the flight crew are about to be told to do
or not do something. The secret to being a successful
air traveler is to pretend that you don’t notice anything,
that it is all so ordinary and expected, you may as well
be on your couch watching television it is so un-
impressive to hurtle through the ozone
uncomfortably close to two hundred strangers.
Another car passes with its windows open — the rain
has finally stopped — and mariachi horns spill out. A woman
greets a neighbor with that musical small talk sound
we make in the Midwest, which reminds me it is time to finally

get organized, but it is so hard to throw things away. I could use
them. I could need to use them and there they would be, waiting
for me, all the Allen wrenches that came with all the cheap furniture
we have assembled here since we bought this house
in the year 2003. I spent a lot of money on it
and I need to keep it until I get my money’s worth.  Someone else
could use it but where will I put it in the meantime
until I accumulate enough of it to make it worthwhile to give it
to someone else. It is wrong to give it away because my mother
your mother my sister a dear friend gave it to me
and it is disrespectful to get rid of it. I might still need it.
I might want to look at it later. I want to keep it
for when I have the perfect place to keep it.

We try to compose ourselves, comport ourselves.
Composition – an act of creation, words or music,
a making of, while compost is a dying back, a melting
into, but also a making in its own right. Composite –
an assembly of, like particle board
or that grey stuff that becomes street,
becomes sidewalk. A doing and an undoing.
Decompensating has nothing to do
with money – it means something along the lines
of losing your shit. I could give a shit and I don’t
give a shit mean essentially
the same thing and this is why
we can’t trust language.

Sunflowers, revisited

Years ago, on the way to visit my mother,
I stopped the car in the middle of nowhere
to look at a field of sunflowers, stunned
by abundance, acres and acres of dazzling
light, their sheer practical luxury.
They were nothing like the print

of van Gogh’s Sunflowers she’d bought
when I was a surly girl, last in a long line
of attempts via her mail order decorating class
to turn our farm house into something chic. I took it
as a personal slam, like she thought all I needed

to survive my teens was a splash
of lurid orange and yellow, did not consider
what she was trying to survive herself.
Those sunflowers, though. Their leaves
like palms cupping the light. Stalks as thick
as my wrist. Faces open

like a thousand plates, turned
like her wizened face would turn
as if in the direction of the brightest sun,
when I finally entered the room.

~~~