were men everyone called boys, townies who never left their neighborhood, never left their first jobs, their first girls, pulling the condom off when her head was turned, ruining her plans for a way out, said real men don’t wear condoms so they rolled them up like whispers in the backseat of their parents’ cars then blamed the town, the way it held and hated them, sunk their cracked sidewalks, ran tar over the backyards of people who’d lost their fight, took to their porches like semi-automatic weapons and drank away their memories, shaping them into new ones, spoke of a town that never existed, seeded in the deli where they could gather over the meat slicer, feel the heft and weight of a shoulder of beef, run it through the slicer for a thinness, a starvation, trim the fat and bite into a richness they felt owed, men like them, yucking it up over the bell that rang when someone enter calling out for a ham and cheese, a pastrami on rye, a club sandwich, a grinder, a way out of a town—down Main, ten miles to the highway. We don’t believe in signs around here.