MAPPING THE CITY: DC Places, Part II Bro. Yao   WHAT WE WERE LOOKING FOR IN THE NIGHT the decapitated head of a negro who smoked boat back in 88 when hustling drugs first became cool and blood flowed in the gutters of DC and friends stopped mourning the death of friends because they were enemies the lost dreadlocks of men who caught religion then lost it and were left with only the spliff and the rain outside a club in Adams Morgan smelling beer, eating giant pizza slices and watching the white shadow creep across the face of the city at 3 am. the women doused with sweat feeling the cold air on their foreheads, tight jeans and bellies out or shoulders bare up under the streetlights walking into the night full of drunk and hungry men with only a smile as a shield the powerless chanting of drunkness scraping its fingers across the concrete and underneath the neon lights, driving drunk with their heads stuck out the window to make it home in time for breakfast pancakes ronald reagan with his cutlass cutting back smiling and talking shit about light phasers coming from the sky to incinerate every dollar bill we paid in taxes our fathers and our mothers and the things hidden in their round bellies, the things hidden in their souls they had no time to talk about, when they wandered through jazz or some other country, singing the songs coming from the radio in their head back when they wandered the night a soundtrack to go with the cubicles of our lives a burning bush that would speak sense for our children a gun that would protect us from the things that liquor cannot hide, the dance the devil can’t do but throws on mortals like my man Rick who shakes so hard you would swear someone was killing him from the inside of his body—but he always say it’s just me a stop sign for gentrification and the will of the people who are not people but interest and politics and the black steel of a gun sitting in a holster full of threats attached to the waist of the cop who hates working nights hoping that no one acts a fool this Friday night though that is only one of the impossible thoughts swimming in his head hip-hop that is dirty like soul food spots, with grease and jello and lollipops and the sound your mouth makes when you chew gum or bite your nails and the world stops making sense while you zone out or grind and wind in the greatest piece of real estate black america has a bull horn to say we are somebody, a giant black smell to call the ghost of a movement up from the exhaust in the sewers what is hot and smells like shit up underneath the city, where the same old history lies like a commercial we saw as a child stuck in our brain on repeat   Bro. Yao (Hoke S.Glover III) received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1997. His work has been published in African American Review, Soulfires, Testimony, and Mosaic. Over the last twenty years he has focused most of his work on promoting reading and history in the Prince George’s Country area. Currently, he serves as an Associate Professor at Bowie State University in the English Department where he teaches composition and poetry; and resides in Lanham, MD with his wife and three children.   Published in Volume 11, Number 4, Fall 2010.   To read more by this author: Brother Yao