A Fierce Menagerie
On October 17, 2011, Terry Thompson released his menagerie
of 56 exotic animals from his Zanesville, Ohio, farm.
While a handful of animals were recovered,
the majority were shot by local law enforcement.
1.The Next-to-Last Zanesville Tiger
How many ways to enter the tiger’s body. This one bred down for its ghostly white fur, around and around the compound. The deputies are sick over everything: Pants shredded around the dragged man’s ankles 2.Bear, Anonymous
In fear of wild animals, the bear, whose name 3.Six Verbs for the Harvesting of Animals
Love. Say that you loved the one culled or captured. Club. For the sheen of its oily black skin. For the quick and merciful blow. Steward. How we took care of you because god asked us. How we filled books with the asking. Extract. The front row of teeth pulled for fear of biting and teach this one to care for humans. Leave it. I say to the collie hunting groundhogs. Love. How I taught her human language so she could learn to love me in it. 4.The Last Zanesville Tiger
By then every last mouth had tasted it, flesh unrendered, the shadow twin were crossing the clearing How something must’ve called it by its most lost name flees, stepped away from our wildness, our animal bodies. 5.Meat
for the Last Zanesville Tiger
Sooner or later you must let the animal go, let Call that day the worst kind of hunting and say 6.The Very Last Zanesville Tiger
The one I dreamed of, uncounted \ unaccounted for. How it crossed seven bodies of shallow water— to drag me from my pity. Or drag me from an ancient need Mini-interview with Janet McAdams HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? JM: I’ve been mulling this question over and have utterly failed to come up with a moment. There are so many tiny overlapping and intersecting moments: snags and hindrances that pushed me in directions as a poet I did not expect. But entryways as well, times when another writer’s work gave me permission to write in ways that had not seemed available. Maybe because the right path was too apparent, too well lit. When I trained as a yoga teacher, one challenge was to recognize the ways each of us obstructs our own practice. “To get out of your own way” as the slogan goes. So, maybe not a moment but a practice? HFR: What are you reading? JM: I’m in the middle of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir. In it, Alsadir maps laughter in all its complexities, but laughter also figures here as a way to think through questions of spontaneity and authenticity. It makes me want to revisit poets who use humor in unexpected ways, Berryman, for instance. Or Natalie Shapero whose poems can be funny, so funny they are deeply sad. There’s a kind of meditation called Laughter Meditation where you all lie down together, on your backs with your heads together. You’re close—you feel the presence of the others strongly—but you aren’t looking at each other. Someone laughs, someone laughs back. The laughter is infectious, rising in waves, then falling into silence until it starts up again. Ultimately, everyone is emptied out, teary even. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. Afterward, you feel rested and peaceful, like a room cleared of clutter. On the poetry front, I’ve lately become interested in the abecedarian, in particular the abecedarian as long poem. Deborah Miranda’s “Alphabet of Lies” from her Raised by Humans, Carolyn Forche’s “On Earth” from Blue Hour, and Lara Candland’s book-length The Lapidary’s Nosegay—these are some of the poems I’ve been re/reading—all of them brilliant in wildly different ways. I’ve long been fascinated by the ways poets unsettle received forms. The chaotic and the orderly. Tilt too far in one direction and the poem feels evasive, too far in the other and it’s just dull. I’m not sure yet if I’m headed toward writing my own or writing about the form—or some combination. HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “A Fierce Menagerie”? JM: A little over a decade ago, a man named Terry Thompson released the animals—tigers, leopards, lions, bears, wolves—from the private zoo he kept at his Zanesville, Ohio, ranch, then killed himself. Most of the animals were shot by local police. I was then living about an hour away, in Gambier, Ohio. My house sat on an acre lot that backed up to Kenyon College’s environmental reserve and my land, like the reserve, was home to many animals. There was a flat, sunny spot where a group of deer liked to sleep and sun themselves. Someone was always passing through: snakes, foxes, a line of wild turkeys, hawks, and once or twice, an eagle. I am glad to be out of Ohio winters, but I miss that land like crazy. The college and the community were locked down for a few hours when news got out about Zanesville. No one was ever sure of the exact count of Thompson’s menagerie, and one tiger seemed (and seems to this day) unaccounted for. That night I dreamed that the tiger was in my woods. It was a mixed dream, half realistic, half fairy tale—the smell of the meat I dragged into the woods for its dinner, the friendship between my border collie and our adopted tiger. The next morning I wrote the dream down; the act of unpacking it and the incident itself led to this poem. The dream was entirely the sort of jejune fantasy we all have about nonhuman animals, a rescue narrative in which we’ve written ourselves as both hero and center, even as we fetishize—and denature those very animals—in ways that are not loving. It’s a story that encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with how we live, our human hubris, our worship of capitalism and commodity culture. There are social class issues here, too. Thompson and his estranged wife were wealthy enough to populate a private zoo, as opposed to the law enforcement agents who were tasked with shooting the animals and were deeply traumatized by it. Ohio had remarkably lenient laws about exotic animal ownership; these laws changed as a result of what happened in Zanesville. But the law changed only in ways having to do with protecting humans. Which is to say, nothing really changed. HFR: What’s next? What are you working on? JM: A wet book and a humid book. The wet one’s a group of poems about bodies and bodies of water, what swims in and through and out of them. I’m a bit landlocked in central Mexico, where I now live, and these poems started during an overly long dry season. Waiting for the rains to come, I read book after book about oceans, rivers, whales, plankton, coral. These “watery places” seem like safe, liminal places in which to work on loss—mine in recent years have been significant. I like to give projects mundane working titles—it reminds me to keep my gaze local—and this one is “Fish and Grief.” Yet I also want to explore the losses of and in these places. We used to grieve our rivers because we had poisoned the life out of them. Now we’ll grieve our oceans because they are boiling. The humid book’s a piece of speculative fiction, still very much in its early stages. In reading about climate change, I came to understand how humid the After will be. I’d always imagined—with zero evidence or investigation—a scorchingly dry world. I’m old enough that I doubt I will ever inhabit that world, not in its fully realized state. Maybe this project is a way of doing that. HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share? JM: Ah, politics. A few years ago, I quit my teaching job and moved to Mexico. The maelstrom of U.S. politics looks different from here, to put it mildly. I come from an activist family, with parents who were the sort of quintessential liberal democrats (Kennedy-era liberals, not what passes for liberal these days) who believed if you just explained logically to people their right to a humane life, they’d seize their mandate. Change, possibility, hope—those must’ve been real things to their generation, and I don’t think they ever really accepted how fully Reaganomics came to preclude any real challenges to the system. Looking back, I’m not sure I did either (I remain a baffled Berniecrat, who still can’t quite believe he’s not our president). But I think this is it—the culmination of Reagan-era policies has led us to a breaking point. The crisis is bigger than Trump, which is to say these policies may have made Trump possible, but he’s not the whole of it. Since I moved here, I’ve noticed an interesting thing. Mexican friends and acquaintances, anyone I’ve had more than a passing conversation with, always check in with me about Trump. It’s a litmus test. From here, the news seems not just grim but bizarre, in reality-challenging, Enterprise-through-the-wormhole ways. A document-stuffed bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, how a folding chair came to be a new, ironic civil rights meme, sinkholes swallowing cars and people. And yet people seem surprised that the planet is on fire. That a town finds itself frozen under a blanket of hail in July. How many people in the richest country live in cars. How many people in the richest country would be happy to have a car to live in. You think: well maybe we could give them just a tiny bit more of the pie. Or maybe we need to bake a new pie. Janet McAdams is the author of the poetry collections Buffalo in Six Directions/ Búfalo en seís direcciones, Feral, and The Island of Lost Luggage, which received an American Book Award. Her chapbook of prose poems, Seven Boxes for the Country After, won the Wick Chapbook competition and was published by Kent State University Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, North American Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and Poem-a-Day, among others, and in the anthologies New Poets of Native Nations, Queer Nature, and Essential Queer Voices. She is an emerita professor of Kenyon College, where she held the Robert P. Hubbard Chair in Poetry, and now lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. 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the generations and so prized
stained as it drags a man
Even the pet bear wants saving.
pelts, bones, bodies.
and the red wound between.
no journalist ever reported, hurtled
toward the deputy in search of rescue.
But no one is saved: not bear or bird or
the monkey by now deep in the tiger’s belly.
Not the men who, months later, remember
the thick air, the field of bodies, the smell
of something they could never identify.
The first one shot, the bear who thought
the humans were there to save him.
Did he think he was human? No.
But he knew he was different from
the muscled cats roaming the yard,
their mouths smelling of rotten meat.
of what stews on the stovetop nightly.
By then
the never-again-pets, not-quite-
wild—
between town and forest.
across a new, strange veld it
not-quite-tiger, barely lions, still-almost-bears, and us
some fragment of weed or unplanned flower
bloom in the bed beyond the kitchen garden.
The deer will find their way over the fence
between my own mowed acre and the forest
reserve they share with hikers and coyotes.
Forbidden to feed deer in winter, one citizen
confesses to a bag of mealy apples, stems of parsley
and mint tossed in the yard like compost.
Hard to mind when this hard winter carves
its shadows between each rib in the twin
fawns’ lean sides. I’d rather fatten them
for the autumn cull, plump them for the fleeing tiger
just learning to enter the race for meat.
how little it shares with early
fall mornings, crouched in the hide,
the one deer taken and the season over.
Or what the ancestors, offering corn, taking
nothing for granted, took.
Not this, the plastic-wrapped suffering
set on the table for dinner.
Who travelled the not-40 miles between the compound
and the reserve behind this house I inhabit,
here at the edge of the village.
Brushy Fork, Black Run Creek, Dudgeon Ditch,
Stump Run, Elliot Run, Big Run, and just beyond my land,
the narrow Kokosing River—
to settle scores. To lick my blood from its paws
and run with me.
Heavy Feather Review 