This time the subway

Rats—Don’t Tolerate Them reads the subway station wall at midnight

you pay your fare at the unstaffed booth and glide down escalators

in the dim tunnel past the platform an unseen engine starts to drone

a breeze whispers along the platform picks up a wind turns a gale

forces commuters off their feet sucking them into the tunnel

they tumble like autumn leaves their phones shoes and loose

change clatter and smash on tile and stone they smear the tunnel red

ride the escalators watching others descend and vanish in the wind

you could do this all night but the fifth wind harvests you too

through the humid darkness round corners past maintenance crews

impervious in rail-clamping magnet boots and well paid for their silence

rush wide-eyed through the subway’s underground maze

grit wires whiskers and tails lash your streaming face you ricochet

the tunnels’ texture changing from sooty concrete to corrugated iron to

sandstone to carved marble to blood-slicked oesophagus to woven

mangrove roots amidst which swim blind white fish to a cavernous

ossuary lined with friezes rendered in femurs on its far wall gleams

and gnashes a steel-toothed shredder tall as a house you hurtle toward it

claw the walls grab at the lamps to stop flying at those interlocking

teeth filling the vast subterranean space with the smell of rust and oil

an alarm blares a shadow flashes you spot the kill switch panel

punch it miss it hear in some hidden alcove the engineer rats laughing

in the fraction of a second the teeth need to eat your arm you know

your bones won’t even slow down the machine never mind jam it

as this marvel of modern transit and automatic malice roars towards you

know this—there’s no kill switch for the city’s romantic traffic in appetites

so lean in unhinge your jaw and kiss the engine’s spinning indifferent teeth