Re: Helicopter
I’ve been summarily informed that because I am not at an appropriate level in this organization, I do not merit a helicopter in my office. Helicopter notwithstanding, I have always comported myself professionally within said organization. I am particularly incensed—in its strongest, most incendiary sense, though I assure you it was not I who pulled the fire alarm which disrupted work yesterday—that this diktat comes from you, a director who oversees a department where professional comportment has long been and continues to be so sadly lacking (cf. G–D, annual Christmas party). Moreover, someone has apparently told you I have been observed “lounging” in said helicopter. This is an outright lie, and I am offended. No matter the helicopter is much too small to lounge in. In reality, it is little more than a balsa wood glider, the kind service stations used to hand out free with a tank of gas, the kind with the red propellor and the rubber band that always breaks, so when I toss it overhead I hear the former occupants of this selfsame office to which I’ve been consigned shrieking like toddlers at the top of a rollercoaster ride just before they plummet to the ground.
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Executive Summary
Make easy look difficult. Swim in the shallow end. Never take a charge but always make the free throw. Avoid sticky and yellow. Order the filet mignon at business lunches, if only to dice strips of bacon to feed the ferret. If you must raise a hand, hold off, yet don’t be the last. Remember: you comprise the et cetera at the end of every sentence that trails off into obliquity. Always leave the tank half full. Kick the can down the road. Kick it as far as a can can be kicked.
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Copy
It’s what you do. You take isn’t, make it is not. The word person. They give you an office with a door you can thank Myers-Briggs for. Content often an omega; sentence mechanics no. When do people matriculate to bullet points? Why argue incent and irregardless aren’t standard English? Sometimes you insert nonsense deep inside a document just because. Faces heterogenous, passive voice the same. The protractor in wire-framed glasses who sidesteps into your cubicle every few days and says I need you to do my thinking for me. The corner-window office who buys you a light therapy lamp in exchange for drafting a bawdy anniversary sonnet to her spouse. It’s a job; it pays. Still. The quick brown fox are you listening jumps over the lazy dog are you there?
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Kurt Olsson’s third full-length collection of poetry, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, was released by Fernwood Press in 2025. Olsson’s poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and Southern Review. The enclosed poems are taken from a new manuscript, The Business, which includes five prose poems that originally appeared in NWWQ.