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Medusa’s clutch gushed out of her neck’s
sleeping nest like a secret. Spray of feathers —
twin bastards of a sea that took what it wanted,
gave nothing back but stone. That’s not to say
there wasn’t blood: Its red tongue transformed
coral beds into viper pits like sunlight parts
curtains on nightmares — bright, prying fingers
revealing hiss and rattle where thigh once shook
under the moon’s dim shadow. Bodyless
but for the scaled meat of her hair, her stare —
wide-open mouth, its empty fountain frozen
in a sigh — stole a dare from logic’s twisted face
to let it change you. No incantations. Only eyes
to beg, forgiveness or revenge, an answer
to the riddle: Which? Which one will come first?
Eyewitness accounts of Anne Boleyn’s
execution betray a mouth still moving in
prayer: lips curled mid-air, grasping the chords
of her missing voice, even as her small nape
split in half, its bloody bottleneck hosed open
by a swordsman’s skilled sabrage — merciful blow
meant to soften the blunt ignominy of the axe.
Biology says it’s possible that the myth points
beyond mere apocrypha — that awareness persists
apart from the heart, watches itself from above
well after lifelines have flattened. But more likely,
the queen’s last words were imagined. In truth,
just an open-and-closed case of “spreading de-
polarization” — the parting surge of a death-
shocked brain, stuttered out like electricity:
Who — who — who —
In September 1945, Mike the Headless Chicken
survived a botched attempt at slaughter: the farmer’s
cut so sideways, the bird’s vein so cleanly corked
with clot, that this brainless cock still pecked
and preened — a modern marvel without comb
or beak — long enough to make the cover of LIFE
magazine. Docked sailors paid boardwalk barkers
a quarter a head to watch the decapitated creature
crow — clumsy sideshow star on strutting stick
legs, its bare gullet gurgling like a fat, feathered
percolator. Death finally came the following spring,
in the middle of the night at an Arizona motel —
quietly as a corn kernel in a throat that won’t
swallow, a defiled windpipe choked with gold.
