Autumn House Press

Pigeons

They carry plague in the blood and gnats
in their feathers, my father said.

He didn’t love cooing under the eaves,
their soft grey murmurings. Each year

the exterminator came with his sweet poisons.
The birds ate and flew away.

I found them in the garden, in the street,
fallen from the arcs of their flights,

broken open into the wormy bags
of their bodies. Father’s fears

I have to turn into my work.
I’ve learned to take a bird away

to another place and let it go
so it won’t fly back,

to trap mice that steal
into a cellar in the hands

of my wire boxes, the gloves
of my set pouches.

Learned to keep anything I catch
Quiet with a blue cloth I drape over

its cage, with sounds I can make
when we drive away from

its scents, its muddy prints,
Trapped, transported

and released, my card says
on one side, and on the other

(it has taken me this long to say)
the unwritten names of my second

cousins, my father told me
were taken on trains, in boxcars,

and forced to shit themselves,
while the cries they made sounded

like coos coming from the other side
of those double-plated metal doors.