“Corporate Intrigue” by Robert Krut

Corporate Intrigue

The office park at dusk, a building
cleared out for a company closing, artifacts

stacked in the parking lot:
five fax machines lean
against twenty-five phones, their
cords intertwined
like the tails of a sleeping king rat.

I’m not making a shadow, standing
alone on the pavement.

The sun positions itself in setting
directly behind one street light,
the moon rising its face
just behind another.
I’m the only one here.

Everything is plastic in this
bulging monument, but for
one strand of hair, laced

through the curls of a phone cord,
a blonde thread that flutters
from wind, a last fabric of DNA.

I lean down, release it from the trap —
each of those phones starts ringing —

the fax machine exhales a single sheet
that reads who did this, where are we?

Robert Krut

Robert Krut is the author of three books: The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (SUNY/Codhill Press, 2019), which received the Codhill Poetry Award; This Is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), which was awarded the Lanitis Poetry Prize; and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Passages North, and many more. Additional information can be found at https://www.robert-krut.com/ and https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-krut. 

Headshot: Robert Krut

Photo Credit: Staff