PLAN B PRESS Issue Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC: Tina Darragh, Gray Jacobik, Tony Medina, and Ken Rumble Plan B Press teamed up with Beltway Poetry Quarterly to publish this landmark anthology in January 2010 that the Washington Post says has "distilled the region's lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years." There are 101 authors included in the collection, and I selected four here to represent the range of this amazing book, by Tina Darragh, Gray Jacobik, Tony Medina, and Ken Rumble.   Tina Darragh CLICHÉ AS PLACE—RAINBOWS The step by step process of looking to rainbows as a PLACE for “pi in the Skye” started awhile ago when reading Eye & Brain— the author tells the story of Sir Issac Newton pretending to see orange and indigo in the first color spectrum he made so he could list seven colors— a lucky number— and this made me feel very fond of science given that I myself stretch things a lot to make them fit   so I started to wonder about my other associations with “rainbow”— for example, the Rainbow Tribe— Josephine Baker being one of my idols for adopting a baby of every color but in reading her autobiography I discovered some facts I hadn’t known— that she’d stretched things beyond her limits originally deciding with her husband on four babies she’d compulsively bring home more eventually adding up to 12 the number of the tribes of Israel and this numerical coincidence calmed her down a bit but by then all the money she made was never enough & she and her husband separated & eventually she lost her place & had to move her tribe to a tiny Paris apt. from which she attempted a come-back & I still greatly admire her but this new information didn’t fit my image of her as the perfect international mother   At this point I was reminded of Jean Toomer having read his book Cane I’d assigned him a role as my “literary” patron saint to go along with St. Martin de Porres for whom I was named both mulattoes who felt they had all the colors of the world’s races in their blood & Cane written by Toomer going from the country (GA) to the city (DC) as I had come from the country (PA) to the city (DC) reading his book in this city— DC—where many scenes take place people of mixed heritage feeling at home as if all their colors combine to make the omnipresent white of the government buildings— the construction atop the inner life surfacing here But Toomer left the line between Georgia and DC & never wrote a book like Cane again instead he turned to promulgating religion through over-long works in which he tries to tie everything together the only link with his past being the repeated sound of Margery/Marjorie the name of both his wives a form of “Margaret” meaning “pearl” & this brought me back to one of my original questions about sounds and geography & I wondered about sounds and the rainbow &, looking it up in the Rainbow Book I found that, yes, a physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had once “amused himself” by comparing the colors of the rainbow directly with the notes of the diatonic scale visible light occupying approximately one octave in the long keyboard of the electromagnetic spectrum but, of course, the editor uses the word “approximately” &, like the discussions of a lot of other relationships to rainbows in the book, I think he’s stretching things a bit because people have always used rainbows for whatever they wanted them to be the Hebrews saw rainbows as a symbol of God’s favor while the Greeks saw them has harbingers of war & turbulence & the Zulus thought they were serpents who’d suck up children and cattle which turned me to the rainbow itself one of many “atmospheric optical phenomena” like the halo of 22°, the sundog, the corona, etc., all the result of water or ice falling through the sky with random orientations illuminated from behind by strong white light & what I hadn’t understood before is that a rainbow exists more as a direction than a location & that I must be standing at a certain angle — the anti-solar point — in order to see it & that conditions exist for seeing some sort of rainbow 24 hours a day for example—last week we got back a roll of film with pictures of P. & D. building blocks & in one shot there is a small arc of light to the right of their building & I’m not sure exactly what to call it or how it happened but I do feel extremely lucky to have been looking there from the right angle to that place at that time   Gray Jacobik FORGETTING DAVID WEINSTOCK Afternoons of bed, of touch, of easy talk, ...........slatted venetian light, a bowl of floating roses on a desk. ...........Copper evening radiance on the buildings we walked past, late meals ...........in outdoor cafés, the shared carnival of city streets, all I swore I would ...........remember, all I engraved in my brain with the stylus ...........of intention, is now, for the most part, irretrievable. ...........What did he say the moment before I understood his betrayal? ...........The loss is nothing to me now— only his name sounds familiar. A heated ...........argument, and later I broke into his apartment and took back a painting ...........he said I’d given him. The Theory of Multiple Universes ...........says everything is always continuing in a world inaccessible to us, ...........yet real. Each moment of pleasure and of anguish, torrid sex ...........and horrific suffering, time and all possible variants, forever ...........replayed. Does this thought console or terrify me? An autumn afternoon. ...........He hasn’t yet said he loves me but I hope he will, and I’ve brought a painting— ...........he hangs it on the wall opposite his bed. It’s myself I want to give him. ...........Slats of light through his blinds. Blossoms of roses float in a bowl. On the tape deck ...........Gould’s deliberate intense piano. He reaches for a pack of Camels, brushes ...........my breast with his arm, stops and kisses it, nibbles at my nipple. We smile. ...........He’ll finish his cigarette. We’ll make love again, then go out and find ...........that Italian place on M Street, dine in the back courtyard in the warm ...........October air. I make this up because it has vanished, because it must have ...........been something like this. Perhaps there were no blinds; that detail is too ...........cinematic. Maybe it wasn’t October, but April. Would he have broken off ...........the stems of roses and floated the blossoms? Only a vague quick-flickering ...........montage of sensations. This is Washington years ago, I am ...........in my twenties. He thought I’d given him the still life: a pewter cup, three eggs, a lemon, ...........caught in a sharp northern light.   Tony Medina CANNIBALS ON U STREET for The Young Lions at Café Nema Regardless of which nightstick Hits you upside your head It still cracks in 4-4 time The streets still flow red The gutter chokes on cherry blossoms Rain splinters into kisses Horses gallop out of horns Punching holes through Smokey neon air Death is a woman You mistook for a bass Stringing her along Somewhere a bomb is dropping Somewhere a baby is screaming Somewhere your mama is dreaming You’ll come home You’ll come home   Ken Rumble 8.APRIL.2010 from Key Bridge Lake Artemisia blue bubbles, map’s bladders— mouth of Anacostia River, way up & out .............(out out (damned spot In Maryland: in the loop, the ring I-495. Off most D.C. .............(meaning federal maps, that lake drains down .............(Artemisia—genus of plants distinguished by a .............(peculiarly bitter or aromatic taste, including the .............(common wormwood, mugwort & southernwood .............(Artemis—Diana, huntress goddess of the moon ............. .............(what do these things concern ............. ............. .............(with a depression in the land ............. ............. ............. .............(water pools into, ............. ............. ............. ............. .............a location (ripples follows a ragged wave of green down the map past Brentwood, Colman Manor, Sheverly & on into the District, widening under Benning, Sousa, Douglass & 11th Street Bridge, carves D.C. to a pair of barbs where it mingles with the Potomac loses its name mixes off the map into the room silt & minnows slosh across the hardwood floors dirty pants swirl in the slight current the bed goes dark & wet cools knees laps ribs swells books like bellies sweeps the page ink into faint black clouds wets beard eyes ears breath buoyant enough to float a few feet off the floor     Tina Darragh began writing poetry in Washington, DC in the late 1960s as a student at Trinity University, where she studied with the poet Michael Lally. Darragh's books include on the corner to off the corner (Sun & Moon, 1981), Striking Resemblance (Burning Deck, 1989), and dream rim instructions (Drogue Press, 1999). Her most recent work is a collaboration with the poets Jane Sprague and Diane Ward published as the belladonna Elders Series #8 (belladonna, 2009). Darragh earns her keep as a reference librarian at Georgetown University and lives in Greenbelt, MD with her husband, the poet P. Inman. Gray Jacobik lived in DC in the 1970s and 80s, and now lives in Deep River, CT. He collections include Brave Disguises (AWP Poetry Prize, Pittsburgh University Press, 2002), The Surface of Lost Scattering (XJ Kennedy Prize, Texas Review Press, 1999), and The Double Task (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). A memoir-in-verse, Little Boy Blue, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. Tony Medina is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University. His most recent books include I and I, Bob Marley, My Old Man Was Always On the Lam, and Pictures of Broke. Ken Rumble is the author of Key Bridge (Carolina Wren Press, 2007), and a member of the 715 Washington artist collective. Raised in the DC area, he now lives in Durham, NC.   Published in Volume 11, Number 3, Summer 2010.   To read more about this anthology: Tenth Anniversary To read more by Gray Jacobik: Gray Jacobik on The Capital Hill Poetry Group: Literary Organizations Issue