From Bay River Press:

Tomorrow After Night

Collected Poems by Lillian Baker Kennedy

From Portland's Munjoy  Hill to pearls and poker, attar of roses and wild bamboo, here is a Maine rarely located.  Peopled across place and class, these poems dance with the contradictions and consequences of "muscled" lives.  Maine needs this poetry, these miniature documentaries for its literature to be whole.    

                    Patricia Smith Ranzoni

These poems tell us why we read poetry!            H.R. Coursen

to order:  email - lilliankennedyesq@prodigy.net

photo by
Tanja Hollander


                Notions

When I was sixteen, I worked in notions.
The small spools of thread,
a color to match material of every dress,
lined up in rows. I knew where everything was.

What a salesperson I was for thread!
I carefully matched each one
to un-cut cotton folded on customers’ arms.

Later, when we got an apartment, we hardly knew
that the candlesticks came from noisy, brick mills
with large looms that had to be fixed
by supervisors working in shifts.
Women waited while machines broke down.
Their commissions were docked by the passage of time.

Someone told me souls are threads
spread all across the universe,
like a pattern, a sphere of souls
that cross and re-cross oceans and continents.
Threads clipped like umbilical cords
or torn off between the teeth, a hasty impatience
to finish connecting or ripping out a seam.
I once lined a jacket, orange, in satin. The edges peeled.
There is no end to this poem, only a kind of unraveling
and unlit candles on empty spools.


Lillian Baker Kennedy

from NOTIONS(Pudding House Publications, 2003)