You or It

Liam Day

In the rush of disembarking commuters a pigeon
ascends to a crossbeam between stanchions
of the station’s entrance awning from the sidewalk where
moments before it’d avidly pecked at crumbs left
by what to others are no more than the careless.

But what can they know of hunger and the indignity of
eating breakfast in public a mere speck at a time?

Know of begging lunch from those who’ve never
known hunger or the indignity of eating
breakfast in public a mere speck at a time?

Of reading in a restaurant’s glass front a dinner
menu from which they can but dream of ordering?

The famine’s victims were sometimes
found at the roadside with green, syllogistic mouths:
if I eat the cow and the cow eats the grass, then
I too can chew blades. Little did they know
transubstantiation isn’t literal.