Occasionally, 
                          at two or three in the morning, 
after I’d not listened to my mother 
and drank the soda very close to bedtime, 
                                                                               I’d awake 
and step downstairs to our family’s only bathroom, 
walk through the kitchen to the what we called 
the new part of the house 
                                         (added on a hundred years before 
when the city water finally made the outdoor privy obsolete). 

In the orange shag room outside the water closet 
– amongst her Tareyton clouds – there she’d be, 
                                                                                           the head 
of a gooseneck floor lamp peering over her chair’s 
left shoulder, its light cutting the blue smoke to illuminate 
the novel, 
                    opening for her the capabilities of those with lives 
unmoored from the meanness of a mortgage 
or the commonplace 
                                        of children.                 

Bunny silent, I would cross the reading room. Then, 
once inside the bath, I’d practice such discretion, 
                                                                                             wait 
until I heard a match strike or a page turn before 
I’d flush the bowl, and await again a similar sign 
to re-cross the smoky motherland and wander  
                                                                                       back to bed. 

She could not have failed to notice the comet 
of my bright pajamas streak outside her margins, 
but we honored one another 
                                                        with a natural, tacit conspiracy 
that she had ever needed to – and I had ever seen her –  
disappear, 
                      abandon us for all those dreamy hours
my weary mother valued 
                                                even more than sleep.

​Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in numerous journals. His chapbooks include Catch as Kitsch Can (2018), The Last Bridge is Home (2021) and Whoever Said Love (coming in 2025). His first full-length collection Blood Moon, Backyard Mountain will be published by Broadstone Books. Find him at RoddWhelpley.com, Facebook (Rodd Whelpley), and Twitter (@RoddWhelpley).
image: olha ruskykh via pexels