He was a scrim-

shaw artist,

a scrims-

hander who

hawked

his ivory wares

all summer long

at community fairs.

He spoke jokingly

of his earrings

dangling

the ivories after they

had been

tickled lovingly

in a jazz trio.

Did the scrims-

hander

not know

that before the piano

ivories

had tickled and earrings

dangled,

some had hung

on elephant mothers

who,

when slaughtered,

left orphaned babies

to howl a song of

woe

across the

the savanna so dry

and low

and not a female

dangling the earrings

while crooning a tune

at the Sands casino?

And to make

matters even worse

and way more obvious,

he etched pictures on

small slabs of tusks.

You could hear the

babies howl all the

way to Northern

Michigan. Maybe

he thought such

small pieces didn’t

matter much

and,

of course, they

were purchased

legally as such.

Why didn’t he just

carve some

Ivory Soap and

then wash

himself clean

of the whole

scrim-

shaw, scrims-

hander, bloody

thing?