Team Leader Takes Us Hostage
We were all inside
of the video call, the
team leader nervous-
giggling, now unsure
how captives might
be different
from colleagues. We
had come willingly,
after all. Opening
the invite. Skipping
the meeting notes:
Click this link and
you grant your consent.
Team leader
wanted to share. He
muted our lines,
offered up his
thought shower, a full-
necked and elongated
heads-up, bringing
to the table all of the blips
on his radar: fruits hung
low, extra-special game
changers, many many wow
factors.
The meeting had no
end time.
The sun outside our office
offices and our home offices,
glanced floors. Batteries
started to die in all
fifty states. We had
long ago hit mute,
visited the toilet,
started dinner.
We only thought he might
be sitting in his car
when the sad moan of a
barge passing,
interrupted.
We texted: is the team
leader crying? Is he
crying?
Sales Meeting
This hotel ballroom,
an icebox. Our shiny heads
tilt, chins upraised. Polite
clink of saucer to cup.
On the lit stage stands
a Big Man dwarfed
by a screen. He is broad
shouldered, arms open.
He breaks it down for us.
Bullet,
bullet,
bullet,
image.
I slow my mind to follow.
This same Big Man, didn’t we see him
last night draped akimbo across
a piano, chortling?
Red-faced and damp,
his words unbound,
his tune joyous.
Gretta Garbo jumped out of a cake,
makeup sliding.
Six pigs, most in knitted caps,
danced the Charlie Brown dance.
It is all coming back now.
Today the Big Man is crisp.
Arial 32 pt, on script,
approved. Standard issue
suit: cuffs white, tie blue.
I recall a dog shelter where I worked,
300 strays, departmentalized, yelping
unable to fight like dogs,
or rut like dogs,
or be dogs.
Laura Cook
Laura Cook has poems in Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, Imprint Hong Kong, The Journal at Ohio State, The San Joaquin Review among others. She loves poems for how they can show us the things we see through but also self-censor and writes often about corporate spaces. Laura has an English M.A. from Middlebury College, works as a marketer and lives in Brooklyn NY.