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.