I read a newspaper story about forty-nine severed heads being dumped at a roadside in Mexico and wondered what on earth conditions someone to be capable of beheading, en-mass, other humans. This poem is the result. It was originally called 'One in Fifty' and a version of it appeared in my book 'A Limited Season'.
Forty-nine torsos
We keep pigs here on the border
so I came equipped,
a sticking knife, a hacking saw,
left the stunning gear indoors.
Señor put us straight,
there’d be no element of surprise.
He likes to see in their eyes
the realization
slowly kindle, flare up and die.
You wouldn’t treat a hog so rough,
all that struggling
spoiling the choicest cuts,
engorging the meat with sour blood.
It takes two hombres
to hold them still enough to cut.
To remove the heads you must saw
through gristle and gullet,
not neatly slit from nape to jaw
like pigs to be hung up and bled.
When the sawing severs
arteries, adobe walls get painted red.
These pigs all the while resist the inevitable,
their protests rise
through viscera in pretty pink bubbles.
Plenty of guys have come down, ready
to stand and be counted
by Señor, and not be number fifty.
