Bedtime Story

by Leone Scanlon

No coffee. The dark, acid brew recalls
mother smoking and telling stories
of the cottage on the island. She
loved to tell how they drank
pineapple rum for breakfast and fell
into the lake and ate stacks of blueberry
pancakes and drank again. ("No one ever
got drunk," she said.) The cottage was
circled by a porch where I slept
under an army blanket, hearing
the grown-ups talk, laugh, waves lapping,
the jazz I hated. The unknown, scary, erotic
brass transforming my mother. Shut away
in the boathouse with a man. Coffee, brown
and grown-up like cigarettes and sex.

Leone Scanlon has published poems in Negative Capability, Common Ground Review, and The Maxis Review. A poem will appear in the fall issue of The Worcester Review.