Men carried hammers with their fists clenched tight, asking

for windows, wooden doors, walls of cardboard, & corrugated

tin sheets that snapped like spines—the skeletons of houses

in the rubbled reliquary of dislocation. It rained the night before I lost

my address in the place and the place I called home. I couldn’t pay the price

to take up space, to make this anchorage of cinder mine. So, I take

the demolition money, bury the serrated skeletons of my youth, & forget

that I grew up in an orchard of sweat where I slept soundly in noise

in the flood-drummed metropolis where pigeons dwelled on my rooftop

feasting as a flock with no permit to settle. Are they not I? Are they not

shrinking to fit the scaffoldings of this Sodom? If I look back, will I turn

into salt? If I stay, will they singe me for my sin? Will I sing my last

mass & join the pigeons in the transience, in the undoing of dovetails

from cleft closets? These birds die after six years. We have been here

for five pigeon lives. To leave is to die. This is the last departure.

A bridge has landed on my doorstep & a paper is asking me to leave

behind what isn’t mine. O, blessed are the poor. O, blessed am I

for when the pavement takes a slow turn to the soft space

where I once lay my head, I know I am only a ghost, passing—