Terry Lucas is the author of two prize-winning chapbooks, two full-length collections, In This Room (CW Books, 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2016), and a collection of his poems with photographs by Gary Topper, The Thing Itself (Longship Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in numerous national and international journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, B O D Y, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review, among others. His memoir, Flight, has been excerpted in Great River Review (Issue 66, 2019) and his reviews and articles have appeared in multiple print and online journals. He has recent or forthcoming work in Free State Review, Great River Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Sun Magazine. His two in-progress manuscripts are Best American Centos and Everything: New & Selected Poems. Terry is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County California and a freelance editor and poetry coach at www.terrylucas.com. He resides in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Elephant Arcana

			I
Ivory Medicine Dolls 
	Chinese Qing Dynasty
Female patients behind silk curtainsExtended fingers, touched breasts, abdomens—
Miniature, supine figurines,Feminine bodies precision-hewn—
Showed doctors where it hurt with discretion.
Wives, daughters of wealth and power, never evenLeft couch-beds—palace women brush-marked pain,
Carried spotted dolls to male physiciansWho diagnosed inked locations—
Often killed out of incomprehension.

			II
Incisors
In 2007, 70% of 1200 respondents in 6 Chinese citiesthought elephant tusks fell out like children’s teeth. When told elephants die when tusks are removed,80% said they would never again purchase ivory.
—Source: International Fund for Animal Welfare
Elephants, right-tusked or left-tusked—favored Tooth shorter, worn down— 
Stumbling upon even strangers’ carcasses,Proboscis-probe skeletal remains— 
Wave, sway, smell, trumpet, caress…
One matriarch carries her son’s femurDays, will not lay it down.

Elephants are losing big tusk genes—Some now tuskless, coping.
Even change is changing. 

			III
Black Ivory Coffee 
Twenty rescued elephants in Thailand, fedCoffee cherries, partially digest
Beans later harvested from dung—washed, Ground into coffee, the world’s costliest—
Fifty a cup, two thou a pound—chocolate, 
Malt, spice notes, hints of grass—Proceeds partially used to save elephants
Otherwise speared, shot, detusked,Left to wander, vagrants unable to defend,
Often killed out of incomprehension.




   

 

Terry Lucas

Elephant Arcana

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