Dave Bonta's "Forecast" borrows the voice of a weather report and bends it into something stranger. The opening line sets the tone: a dry statistic about heat sits beside a "30% chance of suicide," delivered in the same flat, offhand way. That jarring mix of the mundane and the dark runs through the whole poem.
The speaker seems wry and weary rather than openly despairing. Small, odd images pile up: rain that evaporates before landing, a dead rabbit, an earwig carrying itself like a tiny engineer. The power failure then pushes everyone into a kind of resignation. People give up on the power company, decide they are "the ones we've been waiting for," and turn to their own bodies for comfort.
The mood is sweltering, absurd, and darkly funny, but the ending softens it. The final breeze feels meant "just for us," a small, almost tender moment of hope after all the heat and breakdown.