For Lisa, because she asked.

We gathered together again, grown tall like the cat tails on the marsh at the end of our block, once over taken by fire, the trucks sounding, smoke billowing when the school bus dropped us home. We have already lost one of our mothers and now we sat on the steps, drinking beers and laughing, with husbands and wives, waiting, as we lose another mother, this time mine.

She is asleep now, on the hospital bed that waited for her as we rode home in the ambulance on Friday, mother and daughter. We looked backwards out of the windows with our green eyes and we couldn't tell, on roads so familiar, where we were, on the roads that led her to visit her children in Washington, in Philadelphia, in Indiana in the days after the monuments fell and her son was too scared to fly home, so home flew to him, and our New York license plates elicited cries of love from here to the farmlands that stretched out before our open eyes.

The children are grown, Elliott Street is for new families, other families and these days, love flies here to say their goodbyes.