Pigeon Speak

Claims keep assuring that ‘life’ will return,
will recreate past prosperous days,
as if time were finally circling back
and with reward to those who stayed,
purchased houses,
supported local bistros and boutiques
when the economy

sucked. In the fall, I moved north from Allen
to Tonawanda,
with mostly books,
slowly, over months,
insidiously, making a home on fresh shelves,
with my partner, a dog and a yard.

We plan dinners, together, rearrange furniture,
organize pillows, purchase containers, Swiffer.

We eat sandwiches,
hers with onion, cucumber, and vinaigrette,
collect more books, read some,
and try to talk differently, with keener language,
listen.

On odd afternoons, we attend to the pigeons
gathering in the backyard,
drink dark liquor,
and breathe the bizarrely human wail
of a distant train horn.

We consent to being
possessed by weeds, with musk thistle
and crab grass around our ankles,
sense that a neighborhood grows here,
still without name or purpose,
requiring the invention of new terms—
and on this absence, we play, improvise
names for a new community
that we will never write down.

Corey Zielinski is a student of poetry currently residing in Buffalo, NY.