3 Poems by Keith Gaboury | Micro poetry | #thesideshow

Rejoice in Caffeinated Spin

Runaway Legs

I woke up today
missing my legs.

Belly-flopping
onto the floor,
I peeked under my bed

and found last night’s
turkey dinner, the thigh
taunting my subtraction.

How cruel I said
to my pet turtle Sam.
Sam’s shell
shook with laughter

as I clawed up the wall
like a bear up a tree.
At the windowsill,

my degenerative eyes
still spotted my bodiless legs
sprinting through an intersection.

They stopped short
in the neighborhood’s ‘OPEN’
neon glow,

hooking blind sight
of an old hot dog rotating in the basement
of effervescence.

Those legs — could I
identify them in a leg line-up? —
stood in the doorway’s precipice

when I tumbled
onto the hardwood floor,
bruising my paper skin.

Fork

Meanwhile
I slit my belly open
because I needed a fettuccine fork
spiked into the outcropping of my large
intestines now slinking across
the highway intersection
where my mother’s water
broke not like a bone
but like a bank robber
sawing a safe door free
oh the Franklins to the Tubmans
sandwiched a green sea
of maternity ward joy
when the black sheen of her arms
cradled my body
a getaway they say
in the pale virgin
of a California winter
as I snatched a fork
from her plate
before swallowing the silver
down my take-no-shit throat

About the Author

Keith Gaboury earned a M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. While his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such literary journals as Barely South Review, New Millennium Writings, and Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Keith has been rejected from The Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He also co-founded a social justice-themed online literary magazine, Words Apart. After spending his days as an early childhood educator, he spends his nights writing poetry and watching film noir in San Francisco, California.