When I arrived home on school days,
Mom was doing laundry. I’d peer down
the cellar steps to greet her, I guess,
and she’d call back. I was a teenager
and selfish so as she folded my clothes
down in the cellar and stacked them
methodically on a makeshift countertop
beside the slop sink, I pretended to be
doing my homework. That whole time
feigning studiousness. I was old enough
to do my own laundry, mature enough
to know guilt. My memory now of her daily
footsteps up and down the cellar, echoing
off concrete walls, patches of grey paint
chipped off, then later, blouses, jeans, crisp,
an aromatic tower atop my unmade bed.
Written beside “In Memoriam” by Leo Dangel
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