THE EVOLVING CITY Tanya Snyder GRAFFITI I went to your neighborhood, she said. The men outside the liquor store leered but said nothing. They all wore knit caps and no wedding rings. The sign on the door admonished no beer before nine and no dessert till you eat your peas. Starched yellow newspapers blew through alleys and stuck like plaque in every seam of this city with dirty leaves and wet trash piled higher than the crumbling curbsides painted colors coded for parking. I went to your neighborhood, she said. The daytime was rattled, restless panhandling for happy hour concrete the only color. Umbrella vendors appeared in the rain raising prices. Otherwise, buy your newspaper and get out. It lit up at night, bling bling, the street tar black as the sky neon like stars calling from millions of years ago. Bright eyes searchlight the scene glitter and sequins reflecting the shimmy of laughter like tiny moons every juke box playing songs picked and paid for two hours ago by crawlers two bars down. They crowded in, tight spaces all night tightening in high-priced real estate drinking highballs and High Life. By three a.m. the mood was dark and restless again. Bar lights shined like headlights and the revelers their caught deer. Last call hit hard. I went to your neighborhood, she said. I asked for you but no one knew. The woman in the jogging suit and the heart monitor and the iPod sashayed past, muttering something, Dopplered silent. The man walking his dog and his four-year-old shrugged. The hired landscapers on riding mowers gave me a card to give you if I found you. They have the best rates in town and they also do arbors. These were the only people I saw. No one knew you. Separated from the sidewalk by a moat of squared-off hedges and sinister thickets of rosebush, the houses sprawled up and out in three dimensions. I peered in each plateglass window for signs of you. I set off alarms. I was not supposed to come so close. She said, I went to your neighborhood. Ranchera music competed with merengue with cumbia with bachata in adjoining stalls of pirated CDs with color copy covers. Women in hairnets will sell you a pupusa in three languages. They have come a long way through hungry deserts to sell you that pupusa. Their backs are scarred with razor wire. They don’t want to talk about it. Their daughters wear low-rider jeans and navel rings. Their men are the first outside the 7-11 each morning in paint-splattered pants and thick canvas gloves. They rent their bodies by the hour like everyone else. She said, the sun was shining off snowbanks in your neighborhood. She said the children had shoes but no books she said the children had books but no parents she said the children had paddycake and double dutch and they sang all day till dark. She said it rained in your neighborhood till the phone lines came down and the wind howled and the German Shepherd howled and the wives howled. Dirty water washed through the streets like tourists: eddy, flood, eddy, flood. She said, I’ve been to a nation of neighborhoods and yours is the best-smelling, the most secretive, the most heart-broken, the least fattening. She never stays long. She travels light. She sleeps standing up. You’re very lucky, she says. You must be so proud.     Tanya Snyder has lived in DC since 1999, except for two years she spent living in Colombia and Cuba, working with Witness for Peace against US foreign policy. Her poetry has been published in Struggle, Herspectives, and Potpourri. She is on the Coordinating Committee of Split This Rock: A Festival of Poetry of Provocation and Witness, to be held in March 2008 in DC. She is the Director of Voices on the Border, a solidarity organization doing community development work in rural El Salvador. Published in Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 2007.   To read more by this author: Tanya Snyder: Split This Rock Issue