SAHM

They assume you do laundry everyday
where you once would sit at a desk in
a grayish cube for about four hours,
dutifully answering email, as if that was
exactly what the company needed you
to do until you found a pack of similarly
situated colleagues to join you on a
fraternal outing to the lively cafeteria, in
a company so large it had three such
cafeterias to select from as well as a
brand-name coffee house joint where
the baristas could work corporate hours
with weekends and evenings free and
you might enjoy an afternoon mocha only
after descending for a couple more hours
post-lunch into the grayish cube where,
perhaps today, you had spent an hour
on the phone with an angry customer--
angry with the company, not with you,
of course. It was, in all truth, a collegial
sort of place and way to spend your
days, which stretched into a decade
of your life. You have dreams about it
even now, two years after you began to
pad mostly barefoot around your house
during the day, so as to minimize the
amount of socks in the laundry, which
you do only on Wednesdays while
you write a poem, listening for the cries
of a waking baby from the other room.