Poem on the Transbay Tube
On the train I’m always looking
for a distraction
from the train, speeding
through a tunnel
underwater—from my fear
that the tunnel will fail
and we will drown.
All day I’ve been thinking
about the body, about
our beautiful, singular bodies,
looking at the veins
on my forearms,
my underdeveloped muscles—
how could any of this
ever protect me? All day I felt
like a shot bird
spiraling to the ground.
On the other side,
at street-level,
I pay for a straight-razor shave
just so a man
will touch me.
He gets close, holds
my jaw still,
his breath on my ear.
The aftershave
is a cold burn,
so often a following act
for tenderness. Every day,
countless rays and waves
pass through me
undetected. And I am to believe
that nearly all of them
are harmless.
JIM WHITESIDE is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and is a 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, his poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he lives in Oakland, California.
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