"I love you

." he says to me. I look up, startled, hide the bottle under my bag. I am sitting alone on a park bench in Northampton. The sun is setting. I remind him he doesn’t even know my name.
He apologizes. Asks my name. I say if I tell you, I imagine youre gonna start making all kinds of declarations. He has a moon-shaped smooth boy face on a man's body. His hands are lonely, anxious, bunching and unbunching the pockets of his cheap corduroys.
“No,” he says, “I just wanted to know your name.”

the tourist

the light comes into focus. i am not supposed to be here, clutched like this between the tired hip brick walls of williamsburg. the tiny window frames a sky of steel painted sepia with smog.
i am still coming down. i am descending into the subway with my done deeds on my back in lieu of the bags i didnt pack. life perseveres down here, but it is brown and crumpled as the liquor store bag whispering from the tracks: even now a beetle appears from under it.
my shorts were so tight and they were thick like months to a lightbulb at midnight, so that i imagined that if i touched them they would fall. to meet their fate at the lightbulb,
when all they wanted was to swarm and touch wings and make something of their eyeblink long life.