Route 123, Dolley Madison Boulevard, in McLean, VA.
It’s how you get to my childhood home on the Potomac

and to the CIA. Remember the shooting in 1993, right
there at the entrance? Mir Qazi killed two employees

who were waiting to turn into the facility. One was
an agent; the other, a doctor who divined the health

of foreign leaders. Qazi escaped but was later captured,
rendered, and executed. Competing monuments praise

the martyrs: a granite wall with benches, and a mosque
in the port city of Ormara. Dolley would have asked

the monuments to tea, believing that fists are no match
for cake. She is said, by historians, to have given birth

to bipartisanship. In August of 1793, yellow fever found
Philadelphia hiding in a closet. It killed 5000 people

in just four months. Dolley lost her first husband, John
Todd, her infant son, William, and her parents-in-law. Fists

or cake?