Ivoryton

Harnessed to the wagonful of extracted teeth of its African kin, one horse delivers them to me: thirty-two gaunt cornucopias adorned with mud and ebony flakes of gentle blood.

The elephant runs through a knee-deep savanna.

I wipe off some entrepreneur’s black, oil painted longhand, forty-two kilograms and Connecticut, and chisel at the superficial dirty ravines, white birches sloughing their bark.

Men bound forward in lemon grass to their waists.

I sever each into fourths, down through the hollow center then carve out strips.

With shrill, piercing accents, the five bladed table saw separates each into octaves, intervals,

steps. I brush the edges with fine sandpaper, perfecting the dentine, putting each piece back

in the straight line, a wide board of fifty-two elegant veneers with delicate equality.

Their bullets harpoon through her wrinkled skin.

The greenhouse is refurbished, the colocasia moved to a dim corner in the yard. A bleachhouse to sun away the yellow. They bathe for months, the elliptical grain drying for a sweaty grip.

Her ankles are fettered with used, raveling rope.

With paste, I drape each pale piece over a block of striped spruce, and line them up in a natural glissando, neatly, side to side to side like blank dominos waiting to be played.

Their serrated tools broach skin far into bone, nerve.

My daughter sits in our parlor playing Swipesy. She misses an accidental; her tutor cracks a ruler down on her dainty knuckles. One tear splashes onto her hand, dripping red down to the ivories.