DC PLACES ISSUE Dean Smith   BULLET FRAGMENTS, MOUNT PLEASANT Gunfire at midnight outside my window not the usual gang volleys but two shots, definitive, full stops. I see a boy face down in the street wearing a Redskins jersey— a defensive back beaten deep for a touchdown. No sirens swirling lights or squad cars, just a flashlight and the hum of an ambulance idling for pick-up and delivery. “"Don't believe what they say, you were a good son to me,"” his mother wrote on a flyer tacked to a maple tree. I recognized the snapshot from his twentieth birthday. Our brief exchange occurred on my way home from Lautrec or the Mambo Room and consisted of a nod and a "no thanks," when he offered me "rock." At the base of the maple, his memorial grows: photos curled under rose petals, bottles of Remy-Martin drained in his honor, a soldier's goodbye.   Dean Smith is the author of American Boy, which won the 2000 Washington Writer's Prize and the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001. His poems have appeared in Poetry East, Open City, The Virginia Literary Review, Gulf Stream, and the anthology D.C. Poets Against the War.   Published in Volume 7, Number 3, Summer 2006.