The Factory of Your Lungs
Smoke tastes like metal on my tongue
the foreman smiles in sulfur,
his eyes soldered to the conveyor belt of our bodies.
We punch in at dawn,
our breaths counted like rivets,
our coughs stamped “approved” or “defective.”
The machines hum lullabies of ash,
and the windows are painted with the sheen of regret.
Each exhale is a confession,
each inhalation a ledger entry
in the balance sheet of poison.
Hands blackened, nails brittle,
we measure our worth in soot and static.
The clock on the wall ticks like a heart in a cage,
and somewhere, someone calculates
how many lungs equal a profit margin.
Outside, children play under clouds of gray,
their laughter filtered through steel and smoke.
I swallow my own fear like water
in a well that never runs dry.
At night, the factory dreams for us:
gears grinding, hammers hammering,
a cathedral of iron where we kneel
and thank the smoke for teaching patience.
Our lungs learn the language of machines—
a hymn of industry,
a prayer of survival,
a poem we never wanted to write.
Subway Graffiti as Prophecy
Every tunnel wall bleeds messages
the letters twitch when the train breathes.
A spray of crimson whispers,
a name scrawled like a heartbeat,
a symbol curled around a pipe,
telling futures that smell of oil and rain.
The trains howl through the veins of the city
carrying commuters who read nothing
but glance at the shadows
and feel a pulse in their shoes.
Each turn of the wheel presses the ink
into the skin of the tunnels,
and the rats memorize it,
their eyes reflecting rebellions
that will never appear in newspapers.
Someone etched a ladder to the sky
behind a column of peeling posters,
letters stacking like bricks:
resist, dream, disappear.
I trace them with my fingertip,
wondering if the walls can bleed hope
or if we are only ghosts reading ghosts.
When the lights flicker,
the messages shimmer and sway
as if the city itself is rehearsing
a future that refuses permission—
a prophecy written not in stars,
but in scratched metal and soot,
and the steady, unignorable hum of rails.
License Plates of the Oppressed
I read the license plates as prayers—
each number a pulse, each letter a sigh.
Metal rectangles pass in lines,
each a sermon of someone who survives
in the shadows of cameras, of grids, of blue lights humming.
Some plates are poetry I cannot decode:
M4R7Y, L0STN, H0P3—
weaving grief into sequences,
hope into the geometry of the street.
A mother on the highway hums her child’s lullaby
through the radio static,
a father’s knuckles whiten on the wheel,
swallowed by fog and the hum of tires.
The cameras record, the sensors memorize,
but they cannot read the tremble in the blink,
the curve of a smile folded into anger,
the silent rebellion of a turn signal flicked thrice
as if Morse code could escape the ledgered eyes.
Every car a capsule,
every driver a testament,
every plate a petition to a god who may not exist
but watches anyway.
I trace them with my eyes,
I count them like heartbeats in exile,
and in the rhythm of passing steel,
I see all the faces they cannot hold,
all the journeys they cannot name,
all the prayers that will remain unsent.
The Census Tells a Lie
We fit into boxes
but the boxes leak our stories into the gutters.
A child counts her siblings on fingers
that the ledger refuses to touch.
Grandparents’ voices fold into margins,
their accents footnotes no one reads.
Brick by brick, the city swallows names,
keeps our histories in alleys
where pigeons remember better than maps.
The census taker smiles politely
and scribbles a zero where a heartbeat lived,
a comma where a street hummed with prayer.
We live in the footnotes of ourselves,
each apartment a stanza lost to ink and policy.
Our laughter is uncounted,
our grief unnumbered,
our hunger omitted like a line cut from a poem
that the world pretends it never wrote.
Outside, the census trucks drive past,
windows fogged with statistics.
Inside, the walls echo
with stories that leak like water from a broken pipe—
telling the world we existed,
even if the ledger never agrees.
We fit into boxes
but we spill anyway,
and somewhere beneath the official pages
the city remembers us in its gutters,
quietly, stubbornly,
in the only language that matters: being.
The Riot in Slow Motion
Sirens hum lullabies
broken glass reflects our parents’ anger.
The streets swell with a molten heat
that neither day nor night can contain,
our shadows stretch over asphalt scars
like history leaning on its elbows.
We move in slow motion,
hands trembling with inherited fury,
feet tracing the pulse of old rebellions
etched in the cracks of concrete.
Every shouted slogan
is a confession,
every brick a question hurled at the sky.
Graffiti bleeds on brick walls,
names we never knew yet feel
in the marrow of our bones.
Smoke curls from overturned bins
like ghosts learning to dance again,
and the wind carries the taste of iron
as if the city itself
were holding its breath,
waiting for us to decide
whether to forgive or remember.
Our mothers’ lullabies
turn bitter with fire,
our fathers’ silence
thickens into a drumbeat.
Time fractures; anger becomes a mirror,
and in each reflection,
we see the same hands,
the same knees,
the same unbroken vow
to never forget
how slowly, always,
the world learns to tremble.
Ismael S. Rodriguez Jr. (he/him) is a poet whose work explores labor, memory, resistance, and the spiritual residue of modern systems. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nebo, Home Planet, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Muse Literary Journal, and The DADvocacy Consulting Group Blog. He lives and writes in Florida, listening closely to what cities remember when institutions forget.
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