Tuesday Complaints

image borrowed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotor_effects_of_shoes

Here’s a poem by my friend Kathryn Johnson. It first appeared in the 2014 Crosscurrents, which is published annually by the Washington Community College Humanities Association (WCCHA).

Tuesday Complaints

“This is a first world problem.” -Reader quote from Real Simple

No shoes
To match this skirt,
Half a day spent
Packing away summer shorts and ironing winter wool blazers,
A grocery cart with just a few items
Drifting downhill, making me run after it,
Molding applesauce
Exhumed from the back of our too-small fridge,
Thick dust
On the ceiling fan, requiring I haul in a ladder,
No antenna
Tuning professional football into our out-of-range TV,
Crows excreting blackberries on my clean, white car,
Too-weak coffee,
Too-stale bread,
Too-ripe bananas,
Leftover chicken for dinner, again.

A young friend’s three-pound baby sleeping in an incubator,
An older friend sleeping on the floor beside her cancer-weak sister,
One day’s worth of problems here in the first world
Where I count
Too much to eat,
Too many clothes,
Too full a life
My blessings.