Sherine Gilmour
Tired Parent Wanting Poem
I want to be in a hot tub filled with macaroni and cheese.
I want to be sleeping alone in a large bed.
I want to be surfing the Internet for new shoes, too expensive for our budget.
I want to be asleep while having sex and eating mac-n-cheese.
I want to sleep-sex with someone famous and beautiful, but I can’t think of anybody right now.
I want to stop hearing bad news.
I want the Internet to be only pictures of kittens or babies, not quick news bytes about children killed by shooters, children raped by officers, suicide, global warming, polar ice caps.
I want a day when all I have to do is look at other people’s tattoos and laugh.
I want to be cryogenically frozen with my family, then wake to find the economy is better, my son’s health problems have been solved, and I’ve won the lottery. And trees everywhere blooming pink buds.
I want the world to sink outside my door, so I can look out at a gulf of blue.
I want to survive, bones quaking radioactive blue cracks. Rattling still with thunder, my feet firmly planted, the meter inside me ticking down from 50,000 BTUs to 5,000 btus to 1 to 0.
I want to unlock the clanking metal door, slide the rusty bar, open to a world scraped, flung, made new. To my son, “Here’s our world. Let’s go look for bluebirds, let’s go look for cardinals.”
Sherine Gilmour graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Journal of Poetry, River Styx, So To Speak, Tinderbox, and other publications.