Most weather forecasts are written to be forgotten, which is why the second line of "Forecast" is so jarring. Dave Bonta begins with the usual heat warning, "Highs will exceed 100," then adds "a 30% chance of suicide," in the same flat tone and with the same decimal-point confidence. The poem hangs on that collision. Despair is treated as one more condition to be measured and survived, like humidity. What follows is a day of oppressive heat, a power cut, and a small, odd recovery of feeling.
The future tense does a lot of work. Nearly every verb is "will," so the poem has the authority of a prediction. But the details it predicts are so particular and so human that the forecast becomes a way of imagining a day before it happens. The pronouns shift too. "We" covers shared misery ("We will envy dogs their long tongues / & they our ability to shed"), while "you" is reserved for private moments, such as the name you almost remember or the rabbit you happen to see. The dog joke is funny, but it also suggests exhaustion. In this heat, even a panting animal looks better equipped than we are.
The imagery is quietly strange. "Rain will fall part-way / to the ground & evaporate" is a real weather phenomenon, but the line break stages it: the sentence stops midway, as the rain does. The poem immediately turns it into a simile about memory, "like a name you almost remember / & then you can't." Disappointment, whether from the sky or from the mind, arrives without drama. The dead or collapsed rabbit works similarly. Its "lucky left foot" glances at the charm made from a rabbit's foot, and the bitter irony is that this luck has run out. Yet the foot "points / toward hidden water," as if the animal has become a dowsing rod. Even in this bleak image the poem leaves room for a direction to go.
Then comes the earwig, which "will carry its calipers upright / like the nerdiest of engineers." The comedy is affectionate, and it leads to the poem's wry comment on meaning-making: "later on you will consider this / to have been a portent." We look back and invent omens, and the poem knows it. The blackout that follows is hardly a catastrophe. The air goes "unconditioned," a small pun that suggests both a lost machine and a loosening of conditions. The mocking phrase "the effete northeast" adds a sideways joke about a region undone by a lack of air conditioning.
The turn comes when the speakers "give up on / the power company" and "decide we are the ones / we've been waiting for." The second phrase sounds like a familiar slogan of collective self-reliance, here deflated and made literal. With the grid gone, no one is coming to fix things, so people must be their own rescuers. What they do next is disarmingly physical: they "reach for [their] genitals as if / they were real flowers." The simile is deliberately odd. The gesture is comic and a bit embarrassing, but it is also an affirmation of the body and its capacity for pleasure, set directly against the poem's opening suicide statistic. Of everything in the poem, it most plainly chooses life.
The ending is gentle. "We will think the next / wandering breeze was meant / just for us." Attributing intention to a breeze is a kind of pathetic fallacy, and the poem seems aware of how foolish it is. But the verb "think" lets the delusion stand as a comfort. After a day of forgotten names and half-fallen rain, believing for a moment that the world is paying attention is a small mercy.
Formally, the poem is spare. It is in free verse, with short lines, no rhyme, and ampersands in place of "and," which gives it a casual, jotted feel. The lines are short enough that the enjambments land with some force, as when "the power will fail" pivots toward "& the air will go unconditioned." The sound is quiet too: the soft *l*s in "lucky left foot" and the clipped consonants of "calipers upright" give the images a slight crispness.
The poem is worth reading because it talks about despair without melodrama. It lets humor, absurdity, and tenderness sit beside the darkest line, and it suggests that getting through a terrible day may depend on noticing small things like an earwig, a rabbit, or a breeze.