Instructions to the Work Crew Assembling This Poem

The blueprint will right itself once the sequence of increasing/decreasing rectangles, various density, anchored.  Use #9 bolts.

Begin by taking the mirror down to its studs.

Remember, the silence of a line is always in motion.

Because she was given to laughter, the structure is not sequential. The same, with this blueprint. Begin:

     heavy eyelids ensued
     from the overwrought words
     of the everyday personal. 

     It was too much.
     It was too little.
     The cat at home was of no use.

     Didn’t want
     to be unkindly.
     Couldn’t be dishonest.

     Parents get sick
     or not. 
     They are meant to die.

Returning to the task at hand, how precisely does one imbed a mirror?

     She put herself on notice.
     Every time she uses a bird
     as metaphor,

     she should pay up.
     But how?
     By what temptations?

     For now, as in the lip of a bowl
     as in the weight  of the ripe
     be it tomato; be it peach,

What if the mirror we have been discussing is actually a window? If so, does it come with a guarantee of clarify, smudge less fingers even to ink?

Where will the closets be?

     She keeps moving away from the door. 

     Why?

     These words remembered:
     In this new economy
     one egg suffices, one pebble, plenty.

Are instructions necessary on a circle? Are rooms meant to be linear?

     She wasn’t
     where she expected
     to be

     roaming
     in the open
     dictionary’

     and yet
     the tongue
     took to it

     one
     word
     in particular.

Hurry along, it’s time
moving (thus) forward

into
the vast
concrete.

You will need a drill.

Every woman deserves a door that closes; every blueprint, a confessor.






Click here to listen to Kit Kennedy reading "Instructions to the Work Crew Assembling This Poem"






Kit Kennedy co-authored Inconvenience (Littoral Press, Berkeley) and Constellations (Co-Lab Press, San Francisco) with Susan Gangel. Beyond the Human Voice: 7 poems, inspired by the art of Susan Black, is available as an e-book. While Eating Oysters is published by CLWN WR BKS. Work has appeared in SF Peace and Hope, Ambush Review, and It’s Animal but Merciful, among others. She lives in San Francisco and is Poet in Resident at the Bay Times and a member of AWE Gallery Collective.