the streets are near abandoned,
save for children chalking murals
on concrete,
and the occasional sleeping
congregation of salvadorian men,
bathing in the twilight heat.
it's more fun to ignore your gps -
let fireflies be your guide.
walk past the baptist church -
grey granite towering over Columbia
and 15th Street, as at
home in Dublin as it is in DC,
it's steeple peeking out between
a daycare and an sti testing clinic -
and take a wrong turn down Euclid,
toward the park the city calls 'Meridian',
and everyone else calls 'Malcolm X'.
run your fingers along
the worn, chipped red brick of
boarded up family stores, crushed
between steel-glass apartment buildings.
pass beneath those old,
warm sodium streetlights,
slip across the street, and through
the baroque archway gates.
smile as you pass passy girls
sitting on park benches, who
cruise less for the results,
and more for nostalgia's sake, and
hand out cigarettes like
medicine, to the people
with nowhere else to sleep.
then lie out on the long, pocked lawn,
watched over by Joan - the patron saint
of crossdressing, and being burnt at the stake.
stare up at the night sky -
peer through the wildfire haze -
and try to sort the
constellations from space stations.
the trouble with america
is that there is so much of it.