All those streets

all the streets

My mother walked down

All those streets she rode on her bike

I dreamed about them

I felt the weight of the memory

All of the streets, all of the people, all of the time

Every street she ever saw a boy she liked from across the way,

Every street she ran out from the rain into her mother and father’s “doll-house”

As her mother called it,

I sensed the history, the sun and the winter and the cold and the sadness,

The quiet and the loud,

The swift bike rides that became

My bike rides,

My streets,

My shared story,

Riding my bike

Within the same heart,

The same gravely, torn up roads,

Rolling down the highest part as though we

We separate from our bodies,

For a brief moment,

And finally heading down, down

Where I can see my mother on some stretch of road near the Creve Coeur park,(on her bike wildly riding down the hill…)

By the sad Indian girl’s Dripping Springs,

A Jewish girl who had a diary about crushes and homework and family,

Who just wanted a family too,

To have a daughter ride her bike,

Street after street, town after town,

Our dreams were not so far away

Or lost after all.