I read this poem completely as taking place in an adult present, a memory or daydream of childhood. First the title -- it indicates a remembrance from adulthood (kids don't recognise what they are living as "childhood") and then the first line "to shift all day in a zippered dress" I read as an adult working in a uniform (the day shift, maybe a nurse or waitress). The bus is ambiguous -- could be a school bus or the bus home from work -- I thought the bus is maybe the link between adult and child, the now and the then, the vehicle of the daydream. The lovely description of casting off clothes, cares, responsibilities, gender contraints, and leaping into utter relaxation is a lovely daydream/remembrance, and then the calling back by the mother's voice -- I read as the inner child being reminded by the inner parent that responsibility waits, the errands on the notepad, the watch on the adult wrist. I liked the one-sentence ramble of it, the stream of consciousness which reinforced my reading of it as a flight of thought, of recollection.
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