“On the subway” is about a white woman who sits across from an intimidating black youth while on the train. The author uses different types of literary devices to describe a situation. A literary device the author uses in this poem is imagery. The author describes the light as “a couple molecules stuck in a rod of light rapidly moving through darkness.” Another literary device the author uses is allusion. The author said that the black man was wearing “black sneakers laced with white in a complex pattern like a set of intentional scars.” This alluded to scars from slavery. The lady in this poem started off as intimidated describing the black male in front of her as having “the casual cold look of a mugger” and later on compares her fur coat