Within the history of severed heads | Keith Gaboury
POETRY
6/2/20261 min read
Mike the Chicken
kept on clucking
for eighteen months.
Don’t expect that
from a beheaded human
yet a wine-vine growth
pours out a story
that Anne Boleyn tried
to speak once her head
was held before a raptured
English crowd.
Before the drink, Bloody
Mary’s lips
oscillated for fifteen minutes
after the ax fell.
I wonder what royal
language got stuck in the mud
of Anne and Marys’ lips?
Two centuries later,
when an executioner
slapped Charlotte Corday’s
cheeks, witnessing eyes
spotted her cheeks
flip to red light angry.
Did she feel disrespect
down to her brain cells?
In the young twentieth century,
when Henri Languille
got guillotined, a Paris physician
said Henri’s name three times
to his severed head.
His eyelids opened, fixed a vesseled sight
the first two times
like I fixed to eat Mike
once his headless body
dropped onto my pasture grass.
Keith Gaboury is a preschool teacher by day and a poet by night in Oakland, California. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, a MA in English from San Francisco State University, and a BA in English from Baker University. His poems have appeared in such literary publications as Poetry Quarterly, New Millennium Writings, and the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day Series. American Poetry Systems published Monetized Happiness (2025), Falkenberg Press published Still Human (2025), Kelsay Books published The Cosmos is Alive (2023), and The Pedestrian Press published Oakland, I’m Not Dead (2020). He’s also a preschool teacher and a proud bibliophile. Keith lives in Oakland, California. Learn more at keithgaboury.com, keithgaboury.me