BOSTON REVIEW

The new company logo is a torch inside an obelisk
inside a five-pointed star inside a sixteen-sided die
against a backdrop of blazing sunlight. It took years
of focus groups, an in-house creative team collecting
only the smoothest, flattest stones from the banks

of the minor tributaries of each river beloved by
our target demographic, research into their concentric
patterns of worship, the lives of their saints, Saint Flypaper
and the case of the missing anvil, miracle of the giant
tropical lake found on Saturn’s Titan Moon so like that box

of tissues in the conference room that never empties
in the face of ongoing organizational betrayal.
At the quarterly meeting of shareholders, the chief officers
unveiled several new prayers for the test markets: nothing
is impossible—it is your responsibility to make it so,

let us search for management in a stargazing field, let us
sustain new synergies among alleged victims, give us
this day our daily sales cloud. You are the blue arrow
pointing down to a box half-shaded in gray on the flowchart.
Here is your cubicle, your stapler. Burt is your team leader

though this period of consolidation. He developed
an upgrade that renders the old product obsolete
for which he received a fat raise and the right to keep
his desk utterly bare. The shareholders believe
he is an oracle, that he peers into that empty, elegant

veneer, his mind a crescendo underlying a persistent
musical pattern, the end of desire itself, one killer app
for the one Oregonian suffering under sunset’s vague lilac,
one step towards the eradication of mediocrity among
normal children. Your team emblem is a kitten,

your alibi is that you never watched an entire episode.
When the supervisor asks how the product has changed
your life personally, be vague, say you dream less
of free diving with dolphins in bloody water and more
about your fear of local elections. As you peruse

the company directory, try not to notice how many names
have been crossed out, be grateful for the key card hanging
around your neck even as the metrics tell a different story:
what the target audience had for lunch, dinner, dinner, lunch,
barriers to accuracy, ways to boost stamina. Dear co-workers,

let’s dress up in golf shirts and do karaoke with the unpaid interns,
let’s hold a séance on the lowest level of the parking garage,
rewrite the cost savings report in chromatic shorthand, go viral,
erase all the voice messages in the world, let’s paint zeroes
on our faces with printer ink and insist we are as impeccable

as executive letterhead in ivory, as close-knit and happy
as we appear to be in the video from last year’s Christmas Party,
more efficient than anti-crepuscular rays, more worthy
of outlasting the outsource, and lucky enough not to know
just how narrowly we escaped the meandering volcanic haze.

A poem by Heather June Gibbons from our National Poetry Month package.

How yellow the sky how little the understanding

Intangible the things we know for sure

Dusty silica clouds over Europe the very same day

We brought our baby home          His second          Too yellow

For comfort          Too sleepy          Just sleepy enough

For us to sleep ourselves          That was last night

Today the clouds shift          Outside shifts          Rain and shadows

A mezzotint glow          Then no glow          Heart or soul

Exactly seven pounds of civilization

Hematochrome and skin and bilirubin

Yawns          blinks and can’t make up          his made-up mind

The atmosphere can’t keep its own eyes open

We can’t keep our own eyes closed

a poem by Stephen Burt (Boston Review, March/April 2013)

a poem by Stephanie Strickland …

                                CAPTCHA

cranium chambered cairn and passage grave
bulging Neolithic earth mound enclosing the vault

calibrated stone to this standard surpasses us
lost too inner touch on bone pale solstice beam

dervish Snow Queen covens of raven rim her platinum
cloak downed traces of her sledge paused print a fine grid

on the peregrine’s pouring away world of no attachment
tilting wakes twisting falls sinking panes of land and water

dive-bomb raptor-force 200 miles per hour stoop!
copy and mod her aerial maneuvers map Northern core

rock extinct volcanoes lush with perforations cloak them
suspend them under numbers shadows from another place

                                           •

—or site : the Emerald Viewer marks an avatar invisible
as it visits strolls beneath the lindens the lime honey bracts

in the log-on Lab World structured from permissions where
who hangs at your space from your space’s erased from you

nor can you take your own movement for granted
earth and physics afterthought ( interface ) you install

an IM app in your dream equip folding but unfading
tutelary mesmerie with chat while falling as a peregrine

tinsel buttercup foil painted roof ruined roof of the Plaza
verdigris mansard copper slate rushing toward her she could tell

by a tension in the air wire-fine overhead—one rustling
shift—time to be swept back to sea so typed in mistakenly

( no peregrine eye ) randomly assigned CAPTCHA squiggle
Turing test box of twisted-letter text to tag her

                                                                             personhood denied

Click here to read another poem by Stephanie Strickland and here to read more from our National Poetry Month package.