Four short lines, and a whole workplace fits inside them. Dave Bonta's "Pulling strings" opens like a note jotted down in passing: "At the office, a play / with puppets." There is no verb, no named performer, no explanation. We are not told whether the play is a staged entertainment, a joke, or a figure for the office itself, and the poem never settles it. What we get is a setting and a prop. The bareness leaves the reader standing in an empty space where a turn is about to happen.
The turn is the word "But," left dangling at the end of the second line. The full stop in the middle of that line ("puppets. But") makes us pause, and the line break makes us pause again, so the contrast is held back before it arrives. What arrives is the poem's one real move: "like puppets we do expect / a letting go." The word "puppets" appears twice, first as literal objects on a stage, then as a comparison for "we." That pronoun is also a first. The opening lines read like a spectator's report, and only in line three does the audience find it belongs to the cast.
The title works quietly in the background. "Pulling strings" is an idiom for exerting influence behind the scenes, and in an office it suggests favours, hierarchy, who answers to whom. The poem never names a puppeteer, yet the idiom keeps one in the room, somewhere above the line of sight. Even "play" is double-edged. It means a theatrical piece, but it also means slack, as in a rope with a little play in it. The line break after "play" lets the word hang free for a moment, in the one place that is supposed to be the opposite of play, before "with puppets" pins it down as theatre.
"A letting go" is where the poem opens into several meanings at once. For a puppet, it is the moment the puppeteer's hands relax and the figure collapses, freedom and ruin in a single gesture. In office vocabulary, to be "let go" is to be dismissed, a euphemism that makes firing sound like kindness. More broadly, it is release from control, the loosening of whatever holds us in position. The verb governing all this is odd: "expect." It is not "hope for" or "fear." It is flat, almost resigned, the way you might expect a meeting to end. The emphatic "do" in "we do expect" adds a note of insistence, as if someone were conceding a point after that "But," or reassuring themselves. The poem doesn't say whether the expectation is a comfort or a threat. The answer depends on who you imagine holding the strings.
Formally the poem is spare. It has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its lines run roughly six, four, seven and four syllables if "office" is counted as two. The longest line carries the claim, and the last is the lightest. It ends on the open vowel of "go," so the poem seems to unclench its hand as it finishes. Its sound is also quietly patterned. The plosive *p* of "play" and "puppets" gives the first half a bobbing, jerky motion, and the soft, rounded "letting go" smooths it out, as if the strings had finally gone slack.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with how little. An odd scene, a play with puppets at work, becomes a question about agency without a single abstract argument. One repeated word and one pronoun carry the shift from observation to implication, and an everyday phrase, "let go," has its ambiguity exposed. The reader is left to decide whether the strings are a burden, and whether the letting go is a rescue or a dismissal. The poem also leaves a harder question: in the rooms where we spend our days, who is actually holding them?