Tuesday poem #657 : Jamella Hagen : Shiny Silver Train

 

 

Some nights
lately
when I try
to work 

my heart
is caged
in a Soviet-era
subway car 

travelling
deep underground
at high speed
noisily. 

You want
efficiency?
asks the mouth
of the dark tunnel; 

meanwhile,
little steel wheels
screech and grind
against the track. 

I cover my ears,
it’s not enough.
But I suppose
the engineers 

weren’t wrong.
We are getting
somewhere
after all, 

and fast—
we’re almost
to the next station
which could double 

as a bomb shelter
should we need one 

and the longest
escalator 

in the world
will carry us
into daylight.

 

 

Jamella Hagen’s first collection of poetry, Kerosene, was published by Nightwood Editions and her second collection, Perfect Weather, is forthcoming with Gaspereau Press in spring of 2026. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Yukon University, and is an affiliate poetry editor with the Alaska Quarterly Review. Her poetry has won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Canadian Literature, and The Globe and Mail. She lives with her eleven-year-old son, Rowan, on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council in Whitehorse, Yukon.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan