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.