In Joshua Seigal’s “The Instructions”, a grandchild’s written notes are meant to solve an older relative’s problems with the TV, the microwave, the internet. But the poem quickly reveals that the real difficulty cannot be written down. Nana’s struggle with buttons and screens becomes a doorway into loneliness after her husband Michael has died, and the speaker’s patient instructions cannot reach the deeper emptiness.
The poem is written in free verse, with short lines and frequent enjambment that creates a halting, conversational rhythm. It sounds like a family phone call or a tired visit. Lines run over awkwardly, as in “could I come over and turn it / back on?”, so the speaker’s slight exasperation and Nana’s dependence are both felt. There is no rhyme to tidy things up; the ragged shape of the poem mirrors a life that no longer runs in an orderly way. The first movement recounts a familiar list of household frustrations. The television has “turned itself off / again”; the microwave has “buttons seemingly designed to / perplex her”; “The internet is a true enigma.” The word “enigma” stands out, too grand for a broadband connection, but exactly right for a person who has been left behind by a fast-changing world.
Then the poem’s focus widens. Nana says, “I just don’t know how to manage, now / that he’s gone.” The missing man is named only once, in a line of plain speech: “Michael / used to sort the bills – now I don’t know / what to do.” This is the real instructions manual that has been lost. Michael was the person who decoded the world’s demands; without him, every machine and every envelope seems hostile. The speaker tries to soothe her with practical certainties: “all is OK, / all is in order, the electricity won’t run out, / the hot water won’t suddenly go cold.” These reassurances are kind, yet they answer a different problem. Nana is not mainly afraid of losing power or hot water. She is mourning, tired, and diminished.
Seigal’s ending is quiet and devastating. “She hunches into herself. Tired now. Old.” The short sentences collapse under their own weight. There is no remedy offered, only observation. The final image, “She reuses a tea bag to make a weak tea,” is small and concrete. It shows frugality, perhaps habit from a long marriage, perhaps the loss of appetite for strong things. The weak tea suggests a diluted life: still warm, still familiar, but no longer full-strength. It also connects to the earlier instructions—this is a task Nana can still perform, yet even it is marked by scarcity and repetition.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about the limits of help. The speaker is not cruel or neglectful; the notes were written with care. But instructions can only explain how to operate things, not how to carry grief or how to live alone in a house that has become too big. The poem uses technology as a symbol of a world that expects people to adapt quickly, while Nana is physically and emotionally shrinking. The intergenerational gap is not really about buttons; it is about different kinds of loss and support.
The title becomes ironic. “The Instructions” promise clarity and control, but the poem shows that the most important transitions have no step-by-step guide. The speaker can turn the TV back on, but cannot turn Nana back toward strength. By ending with the weak tea rather than a solution, Seigal resists comforting closure. The poem stays, like Nana, in the quiet aftermath of loss—waiting, repetitive, and painfully human.