The Haiku I Left in the Office Suggestion Box
Management asked for feedback; I gave them seventeen syllables of truth.
The suggestion box at Hartwell Logistics had been empty for so long that Carol from HR was using it to store her spare phone charger. I know this because I watched her fish the charger out one Tuesday, glance left, glance right... and slide it back in like she was returning a fossil to a museum case.
Then the email arrived. Subject line: WE WANT YOUR CANDID FEEDBACK. All caps, sent by our regional director, a man named Bruce who once described a round of layoffs as "an exciting new chapter for those affected." The email promised that every note in the suggestion box would be read personally by leadership. Anonymity guaranteed. Honesty encouraged. Donuts implied.
I had been at Hartwell for six years. I scheduled freight, chased missing pallets, and apologized to strangers on the phone for weather I did not cause. And at night, in secret, I wrote poems. Nobody at work knew. My own mother barely knew. Poetry was a second identity I kept folded in my wallet behind the loyalty cards, soft at the creases from never being shown to anyone.
The night after Bruce's email, I sat at my kitchen table with a pad of sticky notes and considered all the candid feedback I could give. The coffee machine that had been "on order" for eleven months. The meetings that existed to schedule other meetings. The way Bruce said "let's circle back" like it was a sacrament. The fluorescent light above my desk that flickered in a rhythm I had privately named the Hartwell Waltz.
A memo would be ignored. A complaint would be filed, which is a fancier way of being ignored. But a haiku, I thought... A haiku might survive. It was small enough to slip past everyone's defenses, including mine. I had actually been circling the idea for weeks, ever since a writing prompt I found online asked me to say the most honest thing I could in the smallest possible container.
So I wrote:
The coffee machine
has been dying since August.
And so, quietly, have we.
Yes, the last line runs a syllable long. I counted it four times at midnight and decided the extra syllable was load-bearing.
I got to the office at 7:40 the next morning, before Carol, before the Waltz warmed up, when the whole floor still smelled like toner and lemon floor cleaner. My heart was doing something ridiculous for a person committing no crime. I folded the note twice and fed it through the slot. It made the saddest little papery sound, like a moth landing.
For a week... nothing.
I decided the box had eaten it, or Carol's charger had.
Then on a Thursday I walked into the breakroom and stopped so suddenly that Denise from accounts rear-ended me with a Tupperware of soup.
My haiku was taped to the refrigerator.
Not the original. A photocopy. Someone had photocopied a haiku about despair and appliance failure and posted it next to the sign-up sheet for the fantasy football league.
"Did you see this?" Denise said, tapping the fridge. "Whoever wrote this gets it."
"Huh," I said, in the voice of a man who has never encountered poetry in his life.
By Monday there were replies. Actual replies, in the suggestion box, which I know because the breakroom fridge began collecting them. Somebody in dispatch wrote one about the parking lot potholes. The overnight crew produced a genuinely devastating three lines about the vending machine giving out expired peanut butter crackers, ending with "we eat them anyway."
Carol removed her charger. The box had become an occupied territory.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about anonymous honesty: it is contagious in a way signed honesty never is. People who would not say "I am tired" out loud in a meeting would apparently say it in seventeen syllables through a slot in a wooden box.
Seventeen syllables is exactly enough room for the truth, and not one syllable left over for the apology.
Then came the quarterly all-hands, held in the warehouse with folding chairs and a projector balanced on a pallet of dog food. Bruce stood up in his fleece vest, cleared his throat, and said he wanted to start with something from the suggestion box.
My stomach dropped through the concrete floor and kept going, past the water table, toward the earth's core.
He read my haiku out loud. All of it.
He even paused at the line breaks, which I did not expect Bruce to know existed.
The warehouse went silent... Forklifts, silent. Two hundred people looked at their shoes with tremendous focus. I studied a pallet of dog food like it contained the answer to a question I would be asked later.
"I want to know who wrote this," Bruce said.
The silence developed a texture.
"Because in six years," he went on, "it is the only piece of feedback that made me feel anything." He held up the photocopy. His hand, I noticed, was not entirely steady. "The new machine arrives Friday. The good kind. The one with the milk thing."
People clapped. For a coffee machine. Grown adults in high-visibility vests applauded a beverage appliance, and honestly, it was one of the most moving things I have ever witnessed at that job, and I once saw a forklift driver catch a falling television with one arm.
The machine did arrive on Friday. Taped to it was a note in handwriting I recognized from a hundred passive-aggressive memos:
New machine's here now.
I counted the syllables
on my fingers. Twice.
Bruce. Bruce had written a haiku.
It scanned. I stood in front of it for a full minute feeling something dangerously close to affection for regional management.
Nobody ever found out it was me, or if Carol figured it out, she took it to the same place she takes everything, which is nowhere. The box got a new label, printed in Comic Sans, reading POEMS AND PROBLEMS. Both kept coming. Some weeks the poems outnumbered the problems, which I choose to believe means something.
As for me, the whole ridiculous episode broke something loose. I had spent years writing careful poems, polite poems, poems that knocked before entering.
The haiku taught me that the only lines worth writing are the ones that cost you a full night's sleep to put in the slot. I read an essay around that time about why safe poems lose, and I remember thinking: the suggestion box knew that before I did.
Three months later I did the thing I had been too scared to do for a decade. I took a real poem, one with my actual name on it, and I entered it into a monthly poetry contest. Signing my name felt more exposed than the box ever had. My cursor hovered over the button for so long that my laptop dimmed its screen out of secondhand embarrassment.
I did not win... I got a kind note and a shortlist mention, and I printed that email and taped it to my own refrigerator, next to the takeout menus, where the important documents live.
Last week I passed the breakroom and saw a new hire, maybe twenty-two, standing in front of the suggestion box with a folded sticky note and the exact expression of a man committing no crime whose heart disagrees. He fed it through the slot. That little papery sound... like a moth landing.
I got my coffee from the good machine, the one with the milk thing, and said nothing at all.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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