Unemployed clouds and blue sky
gaze down through a glass ceiling
framed by industrial geometry
to brick walls and tame plants.
Stacks of white stairs
curve below ground.
Women in trendy dresses –
dull business suits on the men,
one of whom leans from the stairs
to call a hearty,
Keeping you busy are they?
in organizational voice.
He smiles a PR smile,
waves a corporate wave,
bounds up the stairs with
Motivational Seminar vigor.
His listener asks the table,
“Does he know about those figures?”
A tailored solitary reads a fat novel,
reaches, sightless, for rattling potato chips.
“…I like green best for the wedding
and silk fabric…” “My son said
her boyfriend was beating her…”
Two in cropped hair and black and white dresses
lean over coffee cups, interrupting each other,
“If she writes the article we won’t…
“I told you, get the magazine more.”
An iconoclast in non-designer
jeans and ordinary sneakers
buries himself in
the New York Times.
If they knew, would they care –
these sitters on mesh and red
leather chairs, as they eat
caterer’s sandwiches and talk
of love and death and cantaloupe,
divorce and how they should
design the cover of the new brochure
to look like something else –
that the matron in the power suit,
scribbling importantly with
her silver pen, is writing
a poem about them in
her Daytimer?
Marylou Kelly Streznewski is a freelance writer, the author of two non-fiction books, three poetry chapbooks. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in national publications. She is currently at work on a short story collection and a novel. A “Jersey Girl” who grew up in Trenton, she currently resides in Bucks County, PA.
