The Wood Chipper
poetry by Lynne Schmidt
The Wood Chipper
We feed wood into the chipper,
circling metal blades act as teeth and
devour bark, stumps, twigs.
Some of what we shove in still has green leaves or pine needles
trying to bask in the sunlight
because no one has told the branches they’re already dead.
We do this for hours--
Cut a tree,
drag the carcass like a deer to be dismembered.
It comes out as confetti,
smelling like pine scented candles
and for several moments I understand why
these smells find themselves in jars on mantle pieces.
When the tree falls,
when it’s a clean cut,
you can see the rings inside.
I count twenty,
thirty from the one that just fell,
the same age as me,
and wonder why I have more of a right
to continue breathing
and this one gets torn apart.
And we go back for one more tree,
the stump is wet with sap
that looks so much like blood.
Lynne Schmidt
Lynne Schmidt is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press, 2019) On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West Publishing 2020), and Dead Dog Poems (Bottlecap Press, 2020). She is a mental health professional in Maine writing memoir, poetry, and young adult fiction. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor's Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. In 2012 she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.