Local Voyeur : Renee Alberts

Squirrels horde cold busted french fries.  Peregrine falcons roost in the Gulf Tower’s pyramid; both refuse to abandon us to our steel and exhaust fume habitat for the verdant comfort of Pennsylvanian forests that nest our city. A pigeon, feathers smoggy and oil-slick iridescent, stands patient and completely still between the bus shelter glass and a municipal garbage can.  Brittle-boned sparrows peck mustard-stained concrete, scuttle aside for a woman in a threadbare tweed coat. Deft talons tear sinews from a buffalo wing.  She steadies her yellow-nailed hand on the bench and sinks to the cold metal.  On the wall-sized ad in the shelter, a teenage boy at a school desk floats superimposed over a room lined with crime scene tape and riddled with blood spatters circled in red ink.  The woman opens an old, buckram bound book—a spine-split hymnal.

Across the street, chain link and jersey barriers enclose a cement crater where workers erect a new 30-story silver tower.  A Jurassic crane hoists bundled pipes and beams that hard-hatted men on the ground steer and twist with guide ropes.  Above, perched on the embryonic skyscraper, a man in a face visor saws or welds; white-orange sparks arc like barbs of a huge feather.  I already forget what used to be there. 

Unthreatened and unflinching, the pigeon watches me stare, trying to speak to it on some instinctual level—like some heart chakra beacon: blip. pulse pulse. blip.  The pigeon swivels its ball-and-socket head to inspect me with one red eye, then the other, then turns to Fifth where cars hiss and seethe past, flattening styropaper coffee cups and fossilized candy bar wrappers.  I laugh aloud.  "It looks like that pigeon is waiting for a bus," I say to the man beside me who’s been stealing glances at my ass under the pretense of checking if his bus is coming.  Or maybe he's not trying to hide it—I haven't looked to confirm the alarms firing in my force field aura.  He smiles.  He's twice my size, but not much taller, his girth exaggerated by his puffy black parka.  Its collar cups around his head, framing his cheeks, black knit cap pulled low on his brow, tiny silver stud in his nose.  He interprets my joke as a pick-up line.



A woman moves towards the trashcan to toss her egg burrito wrapper, stepping over the pigeon she doesn't notice.  One leg on either side of the bird, she shrieks and staggers as it flings open its full wingspan—shock of white down feathers. It hobbles away from the woman, heading straight towards me, and settles again beside my right boot, as casually as a pet cat.  "He knows you were talking about him," the man in black says.  Then, spotting the glinting opportunity for a charming one-liner, adds, "He came over to you because you look good."  The pigeon cocks its head at me, and I crumble a veggie chip from my lunch bag and sprinkle the greasy shards on the sidewalk.  The pigeon startles slightly, then pecks calmly at the orange crumbs.  The woman with the hymnal pulls a yellow fast food napkin from her onionskin plastic bag and writes almighty in a palsied scrawl. She rises, crumples the napkin in her fist, and leaves on foot before the bus comes.

Renée Alberts listens to rivers, talks to the radio, and translates it into poetry, sound and collage.  She learned all this in PIttsburgh. Her chapbook is forthcoming from Speed & Briscoe Press.  Witness her in 1s and 0s at http://williamthesilent.blogspot.com.