PRETZELS (Jersey City style)

Everybody’s got three names
and I can’t even remember one of yours.
Hey, kid, get away from that water,
 you don’t know where it’s been!

I’ve seen the hard-hats pass off
the rest of a half-eaten sandwich
to a homeless man on a bench.

I bought a pretzel once from a vendor here.
It was hard and stale
and seemed to have been cooked over damp cigarette butts.

I walked along breaking rock hard crusts
into crumbs of sorts that dripped to the ground
for pigeons and gulls to eat and follow me home.
If not homing pigeons – homeless pigeons?

After that pretzel, I wouldn’t buy a hard-boiled egg
from the afternoon vendor.
I think my personal papers should stoke the fire
under those pretzels – couldn’t be worse
and all you’ll have are the published works,
 no more, no less, no muss, no fuss,
no birds following you home
wondering what’s for supper?

 - By Anthony Buccino
Adapted from ONE MORNING IN JERSEY CITY
Copyright © 2010-2018 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. J. Owen Grundy Park, Jersey City, New Jersey.

YOUR BIRTHDAY

YOUR BIRTHDAY
Jersey City, NJ

In honor of your birthday
I fed the pigeons on the pier.
A few showed up, then a few more.

Seagulls arrive to watch from a distance
Squawk for their friends to join the scrim
For pieces of bread I've cast off for them
Into the Hudson River shallows

But mostly today,
in honor of your birthday
I fed the pigeons
on the pier.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER

For my dad, the proud pigeon flyer.
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

PIGEONS

On this walkway, the pigeons are raggedy,
disheveled, dirty and their feathers ruffled.
They are tough,
though.
They need some loving,
I guess.
With all the lunchers
on their power walks,
or sharing looks at my view,
you might

think it’s hard to be alone.
But it’s usually just me
and my thoughts,
and the water and the birds
for most of the hour.
It would be dangerous
for me to live so close to the sea.
I’d spend
all day and all night
watching waves ripple
and crash on the shore.

Can pigeons swim?
You would think
I should know that
having grown up with homers.
But I’ve only seen them
in bird baths.
It’s not the same.

- By Anthony Buccino
From ONE MORNING IN JERSEY CITY
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.
******************

PIGEON MAN SECRETS

Nutley, N.J.

“Like ants,” he said, “they look”
he sees them mornings from his
kitchen table in the yellow house
off Kingsland Street on Brookdale.
He watches their cars stop in traffic.
The hurried bodies pack up and depart
buzz and amble to the corner
wait for traffic to break at Roche.
Hordes would cross, cars would creep,
it was almost better than television.

Turn your feet sideways to step
up the half-size attic stairs
and even at that, a child’s foot
would overhang and a ladder’s rung
seemed gigantic to the tiny step
on up those stairs to where my Dad worked
one day and actually let me tag along
and stay out of the way
to play in the dust and the dirt.

Up in that attic Mitch’s old foot locker
held the stories
long-forgotten and scribbled
by much younger men
discovered six decades after the war
the visions of the Panama Canal
and the wonder of the locks;
and the Marines’ field day shooting
Zeros from the skies over the jungles
of Guadalcanal and the Fijis;
and the loneliness
came alive with the longing for
the Charms Candy factory in Bloomfield,
and the pigeon lofts of home.

In August the young soldier
wrote his best friend
at home the war would be over soon
and he’d be home by Christmas.
But what none
of them knew
was how many more years
it would be
before he again saw his mom,
apple pie, his gal,
or the pigeon loft he left behind.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino