On the Occasion of Thursday in Bronxville

A Filipino lady
in a green dress
hawks mucus
into an uneven star
onto the asphalt.
It sizzles.

The train to New York City
flies through the village
without stopping
and the hardware store here
is called Tru-Value.

Sweaty girls and sparrows
flitter across the bricks.
There are no boys in sight.
no skateboards or
cigarettes held in cupped hands.
Just girls in sticky dresses
and dust bathing sparrows
with their beaks open,
panting,
and one of the girls
keeps saying,
“Penis.”

The theater’s doors open
ejecting the weekday matinee audience
into the heat,
seniors and children
because all the mommies and the daddies
in Bronxville are at work.
The kids and the oldsters,
they blink in the light
and they sigh
for the heat and the
moisture hung heavy
in the dirty air.

The only dwarf in Bronxville
hustles through a crosswalk
with a cell phone to her ear
and she is speaking something
that isn’t English.
It might be Russian
or Polish or Ukrainian,
but the sparrows don’t care.
They think her phone is
something good to eat
and cloud around her
hoping for crumbs..