Polio, 1962

One of the teenage neighbor girls had it, 
a skeletal, ethereal blonde, her skin translucent,  
dark circles beneath her eyes like inverse moons.   
One tiny leg and one regular one, her back like an S  
with an extra flourish at the bottom. Something  
otherworldly about her, like she shouldn’t have lived  
in the first place, then landed in the wrong  
family, with her jovial, lewd, red-faced  
father, her hysterical, fuzzy-haired,  
chain-smoking mother. Where 

could she have gotten it? I remember  
my parents’ whispers about the virus,  
how it eats at the sheath of the nerves,  
and back then I thought it must  
be sexual. Or maybe she got it 
at the public swimming pool? I despised  
going there myself, hated  
how the concrete abraded my ancient  
suit, hated more the boys that swarmed 
beneath the surface, pulling at girls’ suits,  
grabbing between our legs. I loathed  
the cold, dirty changing room, pinning  
the rusty key to my suit, despised  
the bright reflection of sun off  
too blue water. The screaming 
and shouting, that empty feeling  
in my stomach, those boys  
down there thrashing around still. 

KATELYNN HIBBARD

KateLynn Hibbard’s most recent book is Simples, winner of the 2018 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Ars Medica, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. She is also the editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.