Help Wanted

you write poetry at your corporate job and bill it all under operations

because this is how you operate, after all. ignoring the way you make your money because if you did you
would throw your hand in the wall, an absurdity because you would never punch a thing. Not even when
you should have, not even when they pushed you to the limits and waited for retaliation.

because this is all remote and your eyes used to be soft and curious and now they are bloodshot and
apathetic and you feel old at just barely 23. and it’s easy enough when you work on the farm and you feel
the dirt under your fingernails and it’s easy enough when you aren’t shackled to the computer that used to
be for class and contemplation.

but even part time is time and they will take it until you have been bled dry. they will take and take until you
are nothing, until the former gifted kid is just a sack of flesh with a couple brain cells during peak business
hours.

and this isn’t even good writing, but it’s honest and most of you are too afraid to see yourselves in these
words and most of you are shaking your head and wondering how some entitled kid could turn their nose
at corporate stability, how the statistical anomaly found her way into your world and stayed there.

because most of you are looking for truth--but not this much.

Lauren Arienzale is a 2020 graduate of Hampshire College, where she studied clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and poetry. She has aspirations to become a psychologist and is continuously fascinated with the connection therapeutic work and poetic work have with one another.