Shredder Before the Big Move
Take the hum of it:
it cuts my life to strips.
The expired credit card
with a grinding sound,
yellowed 1987 tax forms,
sliced bits of past,
appliance guarantee
for a refrigerator
I no longer own, pile
of letters become bits of dust.
Amnesia machine,
black, reflective, pulsating.
Records for the ‘79 Maverick
with chrome column shift,
clutch always going bad,
so I junked it. Orange
Dane County, Wisconsin
court envelope
with divorce papers
I’ve long wanted to destroy.
Everything comes from atoms.
Everything returns to atoms.
Erase time. Erase
letters of recommendation—
nothing to recommend now.
Forgetting is so much sweeter
than remembering.
College paper on Greek math,
pythagorean theorem drawings
now in fading pencil.
Martin Dickinson is the author of four poetry collections: I Am That Road (Beltway Editions, forthcoming, 2025), Life List Notes (Sligo Creek, 2021), together with his wife, poet Nancy Allinson, What a Windstorm Teaches (Sligo Creek, 2019) and My Concept of Time (Finishing Line, 2014). He was poet of the month for May 2015 for the online journal Blue Heron Review. Dickinson’s poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, California Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Quarterly, and the Russian language weekly Kontinent (in translation) and several other print and online journals. He and Nancy live in Friendship Heights, Washington, D.C.