Fourteen words, one of them sliced in half, and Dave Bonta has given us a whole theory of how to keep a memory alive. The poem is an instruction: *preach*, it says, but not in the booming register we expect from a pulpit. The tone should be "hard as an old pair / of tweezers." The target of the sermon is forgetting, and the poem's main idea is that resisting it takes exactness, not volume. Tweezers don't flatten anything. They pick out one splinter, one hair, one small thing that would otherwise stay buried.
The simile is the poem's centre, and it is oddly specific. A tone can be hard like iron or stone, and those would suggest thunder. Tweezers are small, thin, a little stinging. The tone they suggest is narrow and pinching, a voice that gets hold of a single detail and won't let go. The word "old" matters too. An old pair of tweezers has been used and kept, probably found in the back of a drawer, and its rigidity has been tested. It suggests a voice worn into usefulness by repetition, the way remembering is a habit and not a single heroic act. Sound supports the image. The hard *d* of "hard," the *t* shared by "tone" and "tweezers," and the buzzing *z* at the end make the phrase sound pinched and metallic. "Tweezers" also lands on an unstressed syllable, so the line closes with a thin, high whine, like the tool itself.
The poem is built from two stanzas, three lines and then two, with no punctuation and no rhyme. It begins with a lowercase imperative, "preach," and no subject. There is no "you," no setting, no occasion, so it reads like a fragment of advice overheard, or a note to self. The rhythm is clipped. Lines like "preach in a tone" and "hard as an old pair" carry strong stresses on their key words, and the stresses fall close together. That gives the first stanza a stiff, tapping beat. The line break after "pair" is a small trick. For a moment "an old pair" stands alone and could be two people, before "of / tweezers" snaps the phrase back into a tool. The break holds the sentence in the same grip the tweezers hold their object.
The second stanza is where the poem turns its subject into its form. "Against for-" ends on a hyphen, and the line break cuts the word "forgetting" apart. Read on its own, "against for" is a flat contradiction, two opposing prepositions side by side, so the reader is briefly pulled in both directions before "getting" resolves it. It is a nice irony that a poem against forgetting begins by breaking a word. The reader has to hold "for-" in mind across the gap and reassemble it, which is a tiny act of remembering. The last line, "getting," falls away on an unstressed *-ing*, and after all that hardness the poem ends quietly, trailing off.
The title, "The get," may be the cleverest part. It takes the piece of "forgetting" that is left once "for-" is removed. Here is where I am inferring from the text: "get" is the opposite impulse, to catch, receive, and hold on to. The title would then name the positive side of the poem, the thing being preached for as opposed to what is preached against. It also stands as a blunt little word, much like the tweezers, that grabs and keeps. Since the poem shows us the word being cut apart, we can see the "get" inside the "forget."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It argues that memory is a matter of precision, treats the line break as a physical gesture, and shows the argument at work in its own words instead of simply asserting it. It's also short enough that, once read, it's hard to forget, which seems fitting.