Three Poems
by Ben Pinkard
Ben Gazzara
Tired rattlesnakes inflate
to float on baywater
off the cultural coast of Florida.
Yellow dot a ways off's me
watching The Big Lebowski.
Ben Gazzara, I wonder,
alive or dead? I decide not to check,
to never check
if Ben Gazzara's alive or dead.
It's dark. Halfway to a funeral.
Tomorrow suit shellacs shoulder
but now old rocks stay up late
on a beach new as last week.
What of this is heartening?
Not lofty, glamourous
closure—just happiness.
Should have got more fast food,
ballooned with the rattlesnakes.
Fiddlesticks goes the cable edit,
frick! Can't even curse
a night like this.
Jim Cantore
Live oak dips worryingly, destroys old powerline.
Live oak dies wetly, dies Ophelia painting.
I loved it, maybe,
like trees love swaying?
I'd ask an arborist
but they'd escort my dream behind the woodshed.
Roots plus trunk upturned equals windthrow,
huge dark mass
county robots
annihilate better than weather.
Jim Cantore, weatherman:
something holds till it don't!
Ozona
This feels like a conversation
between friends who've said everything,
mostly. How cool up next
could be fiction we wish existed,
or hardcore yesterday.
Us oafs: kayoed,
something about the weather
breaks records & big houses'
heads are as horses'
bits to leaves. Air's more loaded
than Andre the Giant.
Air's basically sensei, or sensi, or that is
what the underwater monitor
lizards seem to suggest.
Benjamin Pinkard is an elder care worker and student from Tampa, Florida.