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Watch the YouTube video of Kuypers reading this poem 5/9/12 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago (W/ by live piano music from Gary) from the Sony

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Job of being Homeless” and “Over and Over Again” 9//16 at “Poetry Aloud” open mic at the Georgetown Public Library (video filmed from a Canon Power Shot camera).

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Quiver with no Home” and “Guilt” 9/24/16 at “Poetry Aloud” open mic at the Georgetown Public Library (video filmed from a Sony camera).

Over and Over Again Janet Kuypers 5/3/12 So I work here at the front of the store and every ten minutes in the afternoon a young man walks from the deli section wearing his work cap and apron, and drops off a sealed container with eight pieces of fried chicken to set with other, once steaming, buckets of fried chicken for sale. He comes back fifteen minutes later with a few plastic containers of whole rotisserie chicken to stack in pyramids next to the buckets of fried chicken. And it makes me think: does this young man go back and forth between always baking ovens and vats of always bubbling grease to cook the same bird flesh over and over again? I mean, does this deli at this store get large bags of same-sized chickens, pre-plucked, gutted and prepped, so they could just place them in the ovens before placing each identical once-living bird into it’s own mass-produced sealable plastic shell? Do they get vats of chicken parts already breaded for the fryer, or do they get gallon jugs of batter they have to dump the chicken parts into first? ...I’m sure they don’t get their hands dirty with batter: welcome to the corporate machine. Mass-produce dead animal parts somewhere else. Just deliver them to the deli, give the dead animal parts enough heat and leave it at that. Then do they have to appropriately separate, to evenly distribute, the animal parts in each bucket of friend chicken? Get the beast to wing to leg rations right... Toward the end of the day, if some animals haven’t sold, they just throw them away. Mass slaughtered animal, cooked and not sold, is then thrown away. Now, I wouldn’t suggest they give all of their food to homeless shelters, but at the same time, people go hungry, and this store daily throws away food that could help a family survive another day. I mean, I work here at the front of the store, and this is what I’m drawn to think of: a man in a deli, spending hours a day opening and closing the same oven doors, moving breaded animal parts into and out of deep fat fryers over and over again.

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