Town Dump

by J. K. Durick     

Now it’s a “drop off center,” sanitized, de-people-ized,
ecologically friendly and all. The guy at the gate rings us in,
measures and marks us, sends us on our way to sort
our dropped off leavings – metals here and paper there,
and glass and such somewhere else, and the re-usables
get stacked to one side for pickers to pick, they descend
like crows on road kill and drag it away. All day, every day,
it’s this way, our calculated response to the mess we make.
I remember when we drove to the edge of town to dump
what we had on the pile with everyone else’s, a great
equalizer. We’d mix everything together and then bury it
for archeologists to find someday and sort to try to figure
out who we were, this sloppy careless creature we are.