by B. Fulton Jennes
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| ID 10587676 © trekandshoot | Dreamstime.com |
November 12, 2025 – U.S. Mint strikes final circulating one-cent coins.
At 10, I culled pennies from my plastic purse,
dropped them into the bathroom’s metal trash can,
savored each clang. Their removal made room
for worthier coins—those with a silver sheen.
Did my mother scold or slap at the discovery?
I don’t recall. But her lesson stung and stuck:
No small thing is worthless. A penny was more
than a piece of comic-wrapped bubble gum,
more than a fiery cinnamon ball or palmful
of chiclets spit from a vending machine.
It was copper—the metal that cloaked
the Statue of Liberty. It bore Lincoln’s profile.
It had history. It had value. It should be saved.
Years later, still penny-obsessed, I scanned
city sidewalks for coppery discs, bowed before
a speeding cab on 14th Street to pry one
from hot tar, banged heads with a woman who,
likewise possessed, bent to snatch one from
the marble floor of Grand Central at rush hour,
beat me to the grab, glared. I chided a teen who
dumped a handful at a Madison Avenue bus stop,
gathered their discards from the pavement,
added them to a five-gallon water jug at home.
Once I called in sick, boarded Amtrak south
to the Philadelphia mint, watched behemoth
machines blank, anneal, strike pennies by the ton,
a shimmering sea of copper, conveyed by forklifts,
guided by back-braced men—such an earth-shaking,
deafening to-do for something so small, so—what?—
worthless?
Today a two-century cascade of coins grows still.
Dignitaries make speeches, promise to auction the last
pennies struck on Earth. How foolish to spend
2.7 cents to make something worth only a third as much.
Even my mother would agree with those economies.
Even my mother would hold her penurious hand,
her sharp tongue, and see the wisdom of throwing
such spendthrift things away.
The award-winning poems of B. Fulton Jennes are widely published. Her chapbook Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award; another chapbook FLOWN was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook Dirty Bird & Myrt will be published by Dancing Girl Press in the spring of 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer.
