You come here to find suns
sweeping tree-speckled boulevards

& tall cream buildings, trapezoids
sliced toward angled light,

rear halves erased,
black balconies netting their faces—

like pale pretty widows
at a sunlit funeral.

You stalk shop windows,
a mirrored face you do not recognize

in a thin spring chill,
in the isolating foreign.

At the café that once
appeared in a ’90s film:

the cigarette-dazed clatter
of dishes & post-hipster waiters

& faces you’ve sometimes known
on simple nights around simple tables—

artless, luminous faces
moving like smoke blooms,

capturing you as you are—
thin & transient & not going home.