Jacob Sheetz-Willard

Instruction Manual

Begin the poem with a catalog
of impossible wants. Cut vertically

through a sliding mesh screen that might have made
hooks for hanging ornaments or else the high

E-string on a luthier’s last rosewood
guitar. If you can’t bring the world around, slice it

where you can and let it sing. Pen your love
furious in longhand and send it off to eighty six

species of insect, at least two dozen birds and
the nineteen orders of mammal: chiroptera,

cetacea, monotremata... Squeeze the Latin
until it leaks from the twenty seven small bones

in your right hand. Remember that
all of life falls under the kingdom 

of unrequited loves. Brandish your medals
of specific regret. Dress your wounds

and send them off to the midnight ball
with all the others. Buy a goddamn big

plot of land and plow a furrow for each time
an uncle asked why you were still single

at a Christmas dinner. Five years later
mail peaches wrapped in newsprint

to his Chelsea apartment with a note,
unsigned, saying: I have wasted my life.

Cultivate distance. To keep your poem far
from the fate of the old masters, treat it like a living 

dog. Teach it to beg, shake, roll over, but never stay
put long enough to see what the words mean

to do to you. Keep restless. Keep running
through each end stop until you come back 

to yourself at the final flourish. Conclude with one
last resonant gesture, hopeful in the least 

expected ways. As in, all this is just to say: I left you
a slice of pie on the top shelf by the day-

old quiche and gutted raviolis. Take it
with a half-scoop of ice cream and remember me

as the first person I might have been.

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Jacob Sheetz-Willard is a poet from Leadville, Colorado and an MFA graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A winner of the Cantor Prize, recipient of an Ellen Bryant Voigt scholarship and finalist for the ALR Poetry Prize, his work has appeared in American Literary Review, Chestnut Review, Kestrel, LEON Literary Review, New South, Poetry Daily and elsewhere.