MAPPING THE CITY: DC Places, Part
II
Jamie Brown
FALL IN THE CITY
McPherson Square
Pawnshops clustered among
the colors of neon and rust,
massage parlors nestled in
next to fast food restaurants,
cold drafts from subway vents
harbingers of winter, rum drunk
from paper bags in the streets
where trash emulates fallen leaves,
romantic, in the same way the age of
polio was romantic. Hypothermia
stalks the alleys, mugging
the old and life-weary
while churchbells ring, and the old
die, and the young die, but it is
fall in the city, such a pretty season.
Jamie Brown holds
the MFA from American University (1988), where he studied with Frank
Conroy, Henry Taylor, Myra
Sklarew, Linda Pastan, James Alan McPherson,
and Terry McMillan. He is Founder, Publisher and Editor of The Broadkill
Review, Founder/Director of the John Milton Memorial Celebration
of Poets and Poetry (in its tenth year), and Director of the Dogfish
Head Poetry Prize. He teaches at Wesley College in Dover, DE, after
over a decade teaching at The George Washington University in Washington,
DC. He also taught the first Creative Writing class ever offered at
the Smithsonian Institution. He was the Fiction Editor of The Washington
Review of the Arts, Contributing Editor for The Sulphur River
Literary Review, Poetry Critic for The Washingon Times,
and was a member of the Poetry Committee of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
His fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been widely published (including
in translation in Hungary), and five of his plays have been produced
in the DC Area, one of which swept the four major awards in the 2007
One-Act Play Competition in Milton, DE. He is the author of two books
of poems, a chapbook, Freeholder and Other Poems (Argonne House
Press, 1999), and a full-length collection, Conventional Heresies
(Bay Oak Publishers, 2008).
Published
in Volume 11, Number 4, Fall 2010.