from Grammar of the Cage

by Pam Ore

Cutting Up Tamba

(The biggest lives
need the littlest knives.)

All night we handed her favorites:
donuts, Starburst and cigarettes.

By morning, in April, we met snow-faced
and tiny as professionals.

Killing her was simple: a stainless needle
tapped into her tree-trunk leg

poison pumped in from a 5 gallon drum
like reverse maple syrup.

She fell backward in broad daylight,
hard, the wrong way after standing

on her own all that elephant time
on her crushed leg, too-late diagnosis.

It took a necklace of iron chain
and a John Deere back hoe

to drag her head off the drinker,
get her down to the concrete floor.

The researchers and scientists moved in
like a cloudbank, with wishlists and priorities:

The distal 12” of trunk and her head,
for the olfactory pits,

go to the gas lab for chemical
gateway studies; Seattle wants

her reproductive tract—they’re not sure
what for. The curator set the order,

then 15 of us, like crows, with hayhooks and x-acto knives,
began cutting up Tamba

into scientific, then renderable pieces.
After 6 hours, our failure was easy to lift,

carry off in 25 lb. chunks, in 200 garbage bags
on a flatbed truck.

(Her flesh was deep purple, her fat bright and gold.
We worked fast in the blood, before she got cold.)