Pigeon at the Temple of Rats

Walls rattle like a threshing machine, the floor heaves — no place to land among the tight-packed mass of mendicants. A pigeon watches the feeding from the safety of a roof, first with one orange eye & then the other: these are thieves & nest predators. Their outlandish beaks are studded with egg teeth, but unlike chicks they show no sign they’ll ever grow feathers. To them, perhaps, the earth is still all egg. What makes them holy? They drop onto their clawed forelimbs & crawl, brown fur against the dirt, as if it never occurred to them to fly.