THE EVOLVING CITY Jose Padua   ON BROADWAY In a hotel bar on 47th and Broadway there’s bourbon and pretzels on the table, a copy of my hometown paper by the window, and I’m chatting with the waitress, an old girlfriend of mine. On the TV is a baseball game -- it’s The Twins vs. The Blue Jays, and though I’ve had several hours worth of strong drinks and stale cigarettes I’m not seeing two of anything and the only birds I see are in my mind. At the end of the night I get into a cab with the waitress, and as we head downtown in the after midnight noise and lights, Times Square suddenly becomes Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, and I feel like we’re tourists on holiday taking each passing minute on the cuff. But I’m thinking that maybe this is really Disneyland, and we’re children, feeling what we’re supposed to feel as we hold our tickets in hand waiting to go on a ride through the heart of a shrinking world which will abandon us as love and magic had long ago. Jose Padua’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon.com, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, and Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992. His features and reviews have been published widely. He has read his work at the Lollapalooza Festival, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, and the Washington Project for the Arts.   Published in Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 2007.   To read more by this author: Jose Padua