DC PLACES ISSUE Patric Pepper   ALLEY (Channing Street NE) Bobbing the leaves like August’s moody ghost, .....the wind, seen only as effect, stipples soot to each unmoving host, ........on every painted object, now lightly peppers stoops and sheds and cars ............with gritty stars. Mrs. Cheatham’s cats do flits and turns. .....Her bulging peaches blaze through leaves beside her house, where every red brick burns ........with mortal sun that sleeves, in plain and ancient light, the present day, ............as yesterday. The starlings and the sparrows flutter down .....the azure skirt of heaven. Squirrels acrobat across a power line. ........The empty airy curls of pearly sheets hung out last night to dry ............drift in the eye. And then a car pool blares, the factory’s trumpet, .....declaring this the day and now the time to roar for work, to heave and hump-it. ........Reluctantly we stand now, though everything abides, each day, right here, ............without us near. Alleluia, striped and orange alley .....cats, and collard greens like wings. All day today the languid dillydally ........of The Ten Thousand Things. Our nameless alley sings, Alleluia, ............Alleluia.   Patric Pepper's poems have appeared in No Exit, Medicinal Purposes, Confrontations, and The Distillery. His chapbook, Zoned Industrial, was published by Poet to Poet Press in December 2000 as the first annual Medicinal Purposes Chapbook Contest winner. His full-length collection, Temporary Apprehensions, was published by the Washington Writers' Publishing House in 2005. In 2003, he founded Pond Road Press with his wife Mary Ann Larkin.   Published in Volume 7, Number 3, Summer 2006.