A machine manual is about the least poetic form there is, which is exactly why Tara Moghadam's choice works. "Care and Feeding of the Cummins Shredder" gives tips for running an office shredder, but the first stanza already unsettles the tone. What you bring to the machine is "volumes of the past / too thick to burn / too dead to resurrect." The poem never says whose past it is or why it has to go, and that silence is part of its method. The reader infers a life being dismantled sheet by sheet, perhaps after some kind of ending, while the speaker keeps the flat, practical voice of someone pointing out where the Band-Aids are.
That gap between tone and subject is the central idea. The poem shows how people reach for procedure when feeling is too large to handle. Instructions give the hands something to do. Yet the feeling keeps surfacing through the bureaucratic language. "Cradling that larger portion of your life in the less dominant arm" begins as a note about technique, then the word "cradling" brings in the tenderness we give to something fragile, and "larger portion of your life" makes clear what is at stake. Even the "less dominant arm" suggests clumsiness, as if grief makes everyone awkward with their own hands.
The shredder itself is drawn as a creature. The title's "care and feeding" is the language of pets and babies, and the machine "whines for something more solid," offers a "growl of satisfaction," has "wide grinned teeth," and may be "hungry." The speaker must use a voice "set for coaxing." This is funny at first, then disturbing, because the creature's appetite extends to "long hair, ties, scarves, jewelry," the things we put on to present ourselves to the world. The thing that devours the past could devour the person too. That makes the advice to "keep an upright posture" and not "stoop over the feed" read as both physical safety and emotional discipline: don't lean in, don't collapse.
Small word choices carry double meanings. "Paper cuts are a potential hazard" is a wry understatement, and "Allow the cut to drop and fall before introducing new" plays on the same word, so the shredder's "cut" and the emotional one overlap. The capitalised "REMEMBER: You wouldn't be here if it weren't necessary" is the poem's most revealing moment. It sounds like reassurance but works like self-persuasion, the speaker needing to be told the task is justified. There is also an irony in a command to remember inside a poem about destroying records of the past.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, and it imitates the layout of workplace instructions. One-line paragraphs such as "Think horizontal" and "Find your rhythm" stand alone like notices taped to a wall. Capitals ("DO NOT SPEED," "BEWARE") act as signage, and the ampersand in "drop & congest" adds to the office-memo feel. Late technical phrases like "press shavings / through hole in the back of the laminate counter" are deliberately drab, though "shavings" has an unexpectedly soft, woody sound. The rhythm is also quietly ironic. We're told to find a rhythm and not to speed, but the poem itself moves in stops and starts, with long, careful lines interrupted by short blunt ones, like someone feeding pages in and pausing.
The last line, "Follow all instructions: never use reverse," is where the poem gathers its weight. As a rule it is plain mechanical advice, since a shredder that runs backwards would jam. As a statement it is final. The machine has no way of restoring what it has cut, and neither does the person feeding it. No comfort follows and no explanation, only the rule.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It treats grief, or loss, or whatever is being shredded, without a single declaration of emotion. Feeling leaks out through the cracks of the manual's voice, and the reader, like someone standing at the machine, must decide what each page was.