• Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Caleb Kaiser: What Happened in Gehenna

June 12, 2014 by PBQ

There’s a sort of silence, call it
cancer. Call it rabbit pelts, bellies
stuck with olive switches. There’s
a soft-spot, just behind the ear.
Hatchet that birthmark and you
can swallow someone whole. Us sons
have bits of daddy-skull for
adam’s apples. Some say the gravesite
has my eyes, that I come from
a family of dovetailing tumors.
When the birds arrived, we used to lynch
angels for luck. No more cigarettes
snubbed out on our spines. No more ghosts
dribbling color on our cheeks. We
went into the woods as kids. We
slit the soil like a throat.

Filed Under: Contributors 89, Issue 89, Poetry, Poetry 89 Tagged With: Caleb Kaiser, Contributors 89, Poetry, Poetry 89

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

Storytelling in a Box with Neil Bardhan at Writers Room

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org