DC PLACES ISSUE Bernard Jankowski   PAY PHONE AT THE BOTTOM OF ROCK CREEK It is good to find a pay phone at the bottom of Rock Creek— watch the water silently drown out the drivel of DC, let the worn-out words sleep. I don't want to think about the melodrama that brought that phone to this creek— the screaming lover that tore it from the booth, the hoodlums and vandals, the viscious drug dealers and pimps, the paranoid jerks, the whores— the deal-makers, deal-breakers, the big-timers—enough. Let it rest. Silence brings a murmur of minnows up to the receiver. The phone rusts in the sweet creek's shifting sands. This is my news tonight. Bernard Jankowski's first book, The Bullfrog Does Not Imagine New Towns, won the Washington Writers Publishing House contest. His poems have been published in The Atlanta Review, Baltimore Review, Potomac Review, and Sycamore Review, and on-line on Poetry Daily. He is currently working with Boston-based blues pianist Bruce Bears on a recording of his "Shamokin Monologues." He lives in Poolesville, MD.   Published in Volume 7, Number 3, Summer 2006.   More by this author: Bernie Jankowski: Audio Issue