Day Dreaming

It is mid-January.
The forecasters are forecasting
snow. A woman is lying atop of her
made-up bed. There’s a single
electric candle in the window,
a left-over from Christmas.
Across the street in the growing
dark, the neighbours’ lights
come on and a fiction
of peace and plenty wells up in
her and she imagines a radio,
and a woman in
an apron humming along,
and someone laughing,
a teenager, maybe. A cat
runs down a long beautified and
brightened hallway and as her
reverie is perfect, the wind holds
her breath, the snow comes and all
the world is what she wants it to
be, what she wishes
it was, and so for an hour or so before
the kids come home and dinner
from not-much demands her
labour she rests in
an afternoon lullaby before she
draws the blind and opens her eyes.