THE EVOLVING CITY Kenneth Carroll   DC WISHES a breeze in August nightly thunder showers in July silent politicians, loud bid whist games my mother & your mother alive again, laughing in our kitchens our daddies, sober, locked in tonk games raucous as a Georgia Avenue barbershop on Saturday low blood pressure - low murder rates Chuck Brown at da Panorama Room Murrays’ steaks, cookouts, Rock Creek sodas in Rock Creek Park, a seedless joint rolled tight as EU in the pocket at Anacostia Park Mrs. Teency's bread pudding, block parties open hydrants, balling at Kennedy playground Baggy John's jump shot before the drugs Old heads hand dancing at the Chateau us slow dragging in an unfinished basement your brown arms around me, our hips in a desperate grind choreographed by red light & Skip Mahoney’s falsetto safe neighborhoods with real neighbors instead of arrogant urban pioneers & third millennium settlers the end to naïve romanticism about the disappearance of crime & crack filled properties front porch courting - corner debates with Marvin Gaye wafting from someone's open window you & I making out to a Quiet Storm at Haines Point, oblivious to the parade of hustler's depreciating vehicles shopping on H Street with Grandma, Eastover with mommy musty rummage sales at First Canaan Baptist Church U Street muted by four feet of February snow watching fire works at Malcolm X Park Pre-Korean Mambo Sauce on fried wings, steak & cheese from Miles Long Sal-mon & SWords a bama-less world swung to an Ellington tune. Kenneth Carroll is a native Washingtonian. His poetry, short stories, essays, and plays have appeared in Black Literature Forum, The Lion Speaks: An Anthology for Hurricane Katrina, In Search Of Color Everywhere, Bum Rush The Page, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. His book of poetry, So What: For The White Dude Who Said This Ain’t Poetry, was published in 1997 by Bunny & The Crocodile Press. He has had three plays produced: The Mask, Walking To Be Free, and Make My Funk The P-Funk. He is executive director of DC WritersCorps and past president of the African American Writers Guild. He received a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Service to the Arts. He was named one of WETA’s Hometown Heroes in 2004.   Published in Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 2007.   Read more by this author: Kenneth Carroll Carroll's Tribute to Gaston Neal: The Memorial Issue Kenneth Carroll: DC Places Issue