With Each Vertebra I Remember Another Way I Murdered You

Tomorrow, I cut each of your fingers at the webbing and you cried until the poison had sprinted its hot paths through your central nervous system and jogged you into a hallucinogenic fugue that had you laughing and trying to sign with your dangling blooded hands for hours before you got all sad and threw up and died.

A week from now, I coloured you spots with lye and water and burnt you so sweet you thanked me before you passed; you were such a pretty jaguar, all redded like a canopy riddled with sunset.

In a month, I fasted for seven days and then called out the great name Kukulkan and in a feathered coil it held you until your white hands lifted up and grasped, each, one fork of its tongue and Kukulkan drew you into its mouth and vastly swallowed.

In a year, I counted each bone in your body with a long needle and remembered only later that I had suffocated you and all that poking and prodding was in vain, or a mistake, or a desperate clawing hope that some pressure point would pull you back to life.

But next second, one blink from now, with a whistle of teeth, I will forget every bone; with the Maya, I will step away into the forest; I will tread on the bones of the earth and cherish its breath and I will not have to be civilized and maybe I will be able to stop--finally--killing you all the time and get some rest.