homing

our senior year

we lived off campus on

the corner of fulton

& washington in the hood

because we were bad—

ass thugs who read

heidegger & hocked spit

at oncoming trains when

the monthly checks

came in like clock—

work from our parents

we blew the cash on market

novelties: somebody knew

somebody who sold

carrier pigeons apparently

it was a popular trend in south

america. collectively

we invested in a dozen

or so kept them on our rooftop

in homemade cages

built out of plywood nails

& chicken wire. sunday afternoon

while the old ladies in matching

pillbox hats & leather pumps

cooed sweet baby jesus

on their way from church

to the local crown fried chicken

across the street we tied

little bags of marijuana & cocaine

around the small feathered

backs watched our stealthy aviators

hobble left & right under

the foreign weight before unleashing one

into the eggshell blue sky

for a test flight: the bird

shot out of my hands

like a can of soda exploding

this was fast money but we mis—

calculated & the bird fell

somewhere along the way

to queens in the heat

on the concrete pavement

wings beating hard

heart even harder & in the news

police called it a case of

criminal ingenuity. we tried

setting the other eleven birds

free but the catch

we learned

with homing pigeons

is they always fly

back.