MAPPING THE CITY: DC Places, Part II Simone Jacobson   NIGHT CRAWLING (9 p.m.) The men on U Street drag down our skirt hems with hunger in their eyes. They pace and hunt for honey buried within our bones. We snap— the soft side of our fingers crack the air in two. Our chins trace invisible pendulums, Swing “no” in every direction. We've no patience for tired songs of longing. Their elongated syllables dance down our backs Notes flung from saxophone to eardrum sucked into hot air from teasing tongues. (11 p.m.) In perfumed clusters, we scour the windows for music, linking elbows. Suspicious of every whisper. On Fourteenth Street, an upright bass is seduced by perfect brown hands. For an instant, we are hypnotized Jazz quells all fears of staying too long in their lines of sight. The men on U Street hurl desires through open mouths; ..........We resist. Sirens and shouts mingle with Say baby, Hey baby . . . Ey babay! How can we trust that hour where every word among strangers must be masterfully interpreted? (2 a.m.) The men on U Street murmur and sing Their retired harmonicas quiet as morning breath. We dismiss their blues, insecure to be muses to men with nothing but poetry to give. All expectations gone awry, Flesh swollen—our shoes constrict like cake pans. We tell ourselves keep on walking, girl. Just keep on.   Simone Jacobson was born in Phoenix, AZ, but has called DC home for over a decade. She has performed at the APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit in San Francisco, the Bowery Poetry Club, and the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. Jacobson is founding co-director of Sulu DC, a monthly Asian and Pacific Islander American performing arts series in DC, and was also the founder and director of the Urban Poets Society, a traveling collective of spoken word poets. She created the University of Maryland’s first hip-hop dance company, PHUNKtions, and launched an open mic at the Hillyer Art Space, HOME. She is a proud Burmese American currently finishing her MA in Arts Management at American University.   Published in Volume 11, Number 4, Fall 2010.