The Commuter
I rip open the foil packet of synth treats as the MegaMetro wheezes into the station. The label says “Fruits of the Forest,” but there hasn’t been such a thing as a forest in over twenty years. I crunch into my first synth treat as I collapse into a sweat-stained seat. The oversweet artificial flavour just about masks the taste of semen. It’s the only reason I eat them. I’m never hungry after work.
Homosexuality was outlawed outright while the final pine groves still shivered on the outskirts of Vermont. Now the work I do is all undercover, catering to high-powered executives with the discretion or the political contacts or the raw wealth to swallow any fines. Of course, I will face much more than a fine if I am ever caught. It’s a reason to stay on their good sides.
Everything is arranged through encrypted chats, the messages scrubbing themselves within seconds of being read. Most of the execs I serve have to talk the talk of the Moral Militia, even as they procure my services. A couple of them even have the decency to look embarrassed about it.
I still remember sucking off an executive in his favourite boardroom, where I could read the text of Leviticus 18:22 as it scrolled past on the holo-wall behind his head. A minus-fourth century book in a seventeenth-century translation displayed on a twenty-second century screen. Who says the past has nothing to teach us?
History’s litter
Swirls in my exhausted mind;
The train pulls away.
William Shaw
William Shaw is a writer from Sheffield, currently living in the USA. His writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and The Georgia Review. You can find his website at https://williamshawwriter.wordpress.com and his Bluesky at @williamshaw.bsky.social.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
Well I mean, what a premise to start. This is probably the closest to "flash fiction"y poetry that I"ve ever accepted. But the haibun ending I think seals it and the humor and tone are really landing for me.
There’s a sense in a kind of eco/political/futuristic poem like this that dry humor is allowed to distance the poet from the reader while the reader is forced to take a big look at some really big things. But I also think the speaker here desperately wants to be seen in a way that recognizes their humanity. We get this from lines like “A couple of them even have the decency to look embarrassed about it.” The gaze is turned outward here, but then we have “I’m never hungry after work,” playing on both the literal “synth treat” the speaker is eating AND a foreshadowing of…other types of eating. The title “The Commuter” adds to this transient sense that the speaker is neither here nor there, but a body in perpetual motion either to or away from.
Anywaysssss, capitalism is killing us all but this poem is fun!
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
You mentioned on your About page that you were interested in “god/God stuff” – this is a poem very much informed by my own fears of American theocracy, and I felt you would be a good reader for that thematic strand in the piece. You also mentioned appreciating poems that reference “the body,” and while those specific words don’t appear in “The Commuter,” I still think of it as a poem focused on inhabiting a human body in a dystopian future.
I’m drawn to the combination of an eco-premise and the personal political premise set up by this poem. How did you go about navigating those two things together?
For me, the two feel very intertwined. I live in a country where the government is simultaneously working to exacerbate climate change and make life harder for sex workers and LGBTQ people. But it’s one thing to know these things abstractly, and quite another to think about the texture of someone’s daily life in that context. I was deliberate about moving from a first stanza very focused on sensory details to the ecopolitical context of the poetic voice’s job to the poetic voice’s feelings about the clients he services. I hope I was able to do justice to that sense of despairing exhaustion.
It seems like most of your work stems from a "what if..." premise. Where do these come from? How does the sense of "possibility" of certain futures drive your work?
Some of it definitely comes from my reading. I’m a big science fiction fan, and I was conscious about wanting to write a poem in the cyberpunk tradition. I was also thinking about Mega City One from the Judge Dredd comics – the idea of a city so vast it has swallowed up the entire East Coast of the USA feels particularly nightmarish to me. A lot of it also comes from the political context in which I’m writing. I think I’m a naturally anxious person, so seeing some of what the Trump administration has been doing this past year has led me to entertain a lot of dark hypotheticals. I’d love to write a utopian poem one day, but I’m just not sure I’m capable of it at the moment.