affirmative action

[dukealien]

...This wasn't a shipping company; the crates unloaded could be office supplies or parts for assembly.  A hanging like this doesn't break the neck but results in fairly quick strangulation, no? Thus the body could twitch after the ladder is gone. Not all suicides leave notes. The story continuing after the hanging is there because it is really a story mostly about Alan whose character is shown by his actions after his coworker is dead. Without that, the story would have been left hanging. Changing "same" and 'condemned" a very good idea; will do. As for the suicides' motive, I thought his general dissatisfaction with life was reflected in the way he never saw that he needed Alan's help.  The hangee's degree was probably in Modern Dance or a Studies area. Thanks for the thorough analysis;  now to figure out where to send it since poetic stories, as compared to slices of life, seem scarcer than he's teeth.

Thanks for the quick reply and consideration of my critique.

In a spirit of serious workshopping, please consider that this reader, at least, was able to mistakenly interpret the company as a shipping concern, and (more significantly) the unnamed redhead as the poem's central character.  If the integrated company and Alan as central character are significant to your project, you may wish to make them unmistakable.

What I meant about eliminating summaries is that the three lines ("Outside, as if impelled... on an empty life") while dramatic, do not actually add anything (in my opinion).  They're like the suicide's toes tallying compass points at the end of "Brave New World," but that's a novel (and they're also our first notice that he's dead, IIRC).  Italicized "Affirmative Action" at the end, on the other hand, could be the start (or end) of making Alan definitively your main character if he subvocalizes them during or after the funeral.  Just a thought.