index

I was almost finished my orientation when I discovered we employed a poet. It was printed on a laminated floor map, in a font smaller than the restroom labels: ANNEX C. Human Resources, Payroll, Procurement, Poetry. I walked to the annex, stood in the hall, and watched my reflection in the elevator doors. The poet’s office had no window, only a rectangular light that hummed. That, and a corkboard pinned with torn memo corners: “Whereas,” “Therefore,” “Kind regards.”

I had come in as a data analyst, learning what made other people’s numbers misbehave. I asked my manager.

“The poet is legacy,” she said. “From the merger, before my time.”

“What does the poet do?”

“You know,” she said, “the same thing we do. Aligns outcomes.”

I spent the morning configuring my displays — vertical, dual — and because I am not a liar I will admit that I searched the shared drive for the word ‘poem’. It returned a range of documents. Many looked like ordinary announcements, except for the line breaks. An example:

Subject: Vending Machine Update

Please see the
attached list of items to be
discontinued, with particular attention
to peanuts and items with
peanut-adjacent
implications.

We appreciate your
cooperation.

I reread this three times without understanding it differently. Midafternoon, an email arrived:

Welcome. Annex C requests a brief introduction.
Please bring the following:

• A compliance incident (minor)
• A stapled packet (eight pages)
• An adverb that does not fit on a slide

The signature block identified no person, only a guideline for interdepartmental correspondence. I considered forwarding it to IT, as I already had with other phantoms — my security badge, demagnetised; a vending machine that would not return coins. Instead, I found a stapler and pulled eight blank pages from the printer tray, then stapled them twice for good luck. I searched for an adverb and found one on the back of my mind — largely — which has never done a day of serious work in its life.

Annex C was at the end of a corridor that twisted once for no reason. A plaque in the wall listed names of committees that I suspect no longer met. I entered, and a woman sat behind a narrow desk with a tablet. She wore a badge without a logo.

“You brought a stapled packet,” she said. “And luck.”

“I couldn’t think of a compliance incident.”

“Everyone can,” she said, and then, “I’m V.”

“I’m not a poet,” I told her. “I’m here by mistake.”

“That is precisely the sort of thing a poet would say.”

“I’m an analyst.”

“And you think that excludes you.” She closed the tablet and slid a single page across the desk. The paper was a form. It was called Request to Invoke. “We write things that make other things go.”

I must have looked confused.

“Your department writes formulas. We write the space around the formulas.”

“Spells,” I said, half as a joke.

“Procedures,” she said. “This is a consultancy. Everything we do is a promise.”

I took the form back to my desk and did not fill it out. That night I dreamed that V walked across a warehouse floor measuring her steps by syllables. She moved with the rhythm of someone counting under her breath.

In the days after, I began to notice odd concordances. A colleague complained that the vending machine swallowed his coin and then returned it with a small clink, identical in tone. Each loop was exactly itself. He did this seven times while telling me about a reconciliation issue, and on the seventh time the machine coughed out a bag of salted cashews, which we had been told were discontinued. When I looked up the memo about peanuts, the line breaks had migrated. The word adjacent had shifted, acquiring a pushpin hole in the margin, as if someone had moved the lines physically and put them back.

There is a way the mind settles around an anomaly. In my report I described the vending machine issue as “idempotent.” The word had the right sort of mouthfeel for a secret.

At the end of the quarter, the CFO held an all-hands in the auditorium. The ceiling was gridded, an empty spreadsheet. His tie was a confident red.

He did not talk about right-sizing, the cost of capital, or headcount.

“Before we close the year,” he said, “we align.”

A murmur: the sort people make when something is both unexpected and oddly reassuring.

“We are not artists. We are custodians.”

Minutes and emails, he explained, invoices and memos and small personal statements would be collected from the staff. It would fix the company to the year, a sail to the wind. Once the poem was formed and signed, the balance sheet would consent to balancing. If not, the numbers would misalign and echo. I suppose my colleague’s coin would return forever, that same tone repeating.

Afterwards my manager said, “Make sure your team submits a sentence.”

“What kind of sentence?”

“Any sentence will do,” she said. “But it should be true.”

I thought of V counting. I thought of the vending machine’s calm insistence that nothing new was happening. The next day, when Annex C requested my line, I wrote: At precisely 4.14 p.m., I realised I have never once met the person who cleans my desk.

A week later, a draft appeared on the intranet. It was a column of stanzas with the names removed. You could recognise your line by the small habits of your prose. Some spoke of sales won and lost, of tiny miracles in processing times, invoices that, when stacked, formed a city of thin towers. One told of an apology made in a stairwell. Another said only, The window on the third floor does not open but I think about opening it every day.

As the company read itself, we calmed. The complaints channel was quiet. The reconciliation issues — that intemperate echo — narrowed to a single, stubborn dollar that showed up wherever it liked.

We assembled for the signing in the late afternoon. The poet, of course, was V. She wore the badge without a logo and carried her tablet and, oddly, a fountain pen. The CFO stood beside her like a tall bookend. V thanked us. Her voice was not theatrical. She read the poem from the top, and as she read the lines the room seemed to rearrange itself very slightly around each sentence, as if a bulb warmed to a different wattage. Personal names had been excised, but the poem did not feel anonymous. It felt like the building was reading out its inventory of human weather.

When she reached my line, she paused — maybe only because the next page had stuck to the one she was holding — and then continued. The janitor’s closet was behind the boardroom, and I thought I heard a bucket shift. It wasn’t part of the poem, and yet it was.

V came to the final section, in which the “therefores” accrue. It was a short section that year. Perhaps we had used up all our therefores in private. She ended with a sentence that, later, I could not find in the posted draft:

We acknowledge the dust that does not sign this paper.

The CFO handed her something. She signed on the tablet. He signed after her. The room exhaled. That is not a metaphor; you can feel twenty-something breathing bodies when they stop doing it at once and then start again. We were dismissed, and I think the dollar went back where it belonged.

A few days after, a memo arrived from Procurement with a list of approved pen brands. The fountain pen was not on it. There was no reason to connect these events. Still, I went to Annex C on a pretext and found V rethreading the ribbon on an ancient printing calculator.

“You signed something that wasn’t on the draft,” I said.

“I added nothing,” she said. “But some things ask to be acknowledged.”

“You mean the janitor.”

“I mean the dust,” she said without smiling, though I understood I had not been corrected. “Words are corridors. They connect rooms you don’t remember entering.”

“Are you leaving?” I asked. “Because of the pen?”

“Everyone leaves,” she said. “That is one of the corridors.”

That quarter, my numbers behaved. I slept well. It would be too simple to give the poem credit or blame. Meanwhile, the company continued consulting, which is like making roads no one sees. Around spring I passed V in the lobby and she asked if I had a minute. We sat on a bench that was slightly too short for both of us, which meant we had to keep our elbows close.

“I need a line,” she said.

“I thought lines were annual.”

“This one is not for the record.”

I tried to think. The lobby had a fern that had been overwatered; our ambition of growth. A man in a light blue blazer argued quietly with himself.

“Use that,” she said. “Exactly that.”

“Which part?”

“The man in the blazer,” she said. “And your problem with indefinite reference. It may not seem it, but precision is a way of being kind.”

After she left, I wrote her a sentence so exact it felt obscene:

The man in the blue blazer looked at his phone as if it were a mirror that had chosen the wrong face.

Weeks later I found my sentence, bent into a report on brand perception. Perhaps that was what poems did here — circulated, oxygenated like blood. I began, quietly, to experiment. A memo about the vending machine included an extra comma, a place for breath. The next day, the coin went through at last, and gave change. I renamed a column from NAMES_MISC to PEOPLE_PRESENT, and a meeting that had always run over ended exactly on time, like a door that opens before you reach it.

In late summer, the email came that V was leaving. Not to anywhere, just away. Annex C put out a Request for Interest. I did not answer it. It felt like volunteering to become part of the building. It felt like acquiring a second spine, made of paper and staples.

On her last day, I found a packet on my chair. Eight pages, stapled twice, a faint coffee ring on the top. Inside was the form, Request to Invoke, and under it a paragraph in her careful hand:

If no one appears to clean your desk, it is because you never put anything down. Leave a little of yourself. The world furnishes returned value.

She had crossed out world and written company above it. Then she crossed out company and left the line bare.

For a while I kept the form in a drawer, then pinned it to my corkboard under my security badge. People came by and asked what it was, and I said, with as much precision as I could manage, “A procedure.”

As the end of the next year approached, I began to think about chance. Vending coins. Stubborn dollars. On the day Annex C requested submissions, I wrote this:

At 4.14 p.m., I realised that if the poem is a sail, then we are not the ship but the wind.

I winced, deleted it, and wrote instead:

At 4.14 p.m., someone wiped my desk. I did not see who. I can only say that the dust is not here.