‘THIS IS MY DAY’, ‘BOBOLINKO AT SOMEWHAT SWEET SIXTEEN’ & ‘NEPTUNE’S HIPPOCAMP’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

THIS IS MY DAY

The sun gets a little too familiar
with me as I’m trying hard to wake up.
His persistent hand on my arm feels warm.
I trudge downstairs, put on coffee, cat fur
on my grandmother’s 1918 cup.
Weather.com says prepare for a storm
around five. Prepare what? Have a party?
Right now I must go to work. I’m not free
to take off, get on a plane, and smell roses
in Naples. My car smells like Burger King.
I warble along with “Draggin’ The Line”
and almost hit a dog. A hawk poses
on a billboard for a church. Everything
turns foggy. My car stalls on an incline.

BOBOLINKO AT SOMEWHAT SWEET SIXTEEN

You were my first.
Was I yours?
You said I was. Maybe
you were being discreet,
even then, at sweet sixteen,
when we stole Mary Jane candy
from Ben Franklin’s which we
ate naked.

NEPTUNE’S HIPPOCAMP

A comet hit Proteus, birthing you.
I could walk across you in just one day,
small as you are, a dark world, hard to view.
A comet hit Proteus, birthing you,
Hippocamp, half fish, half horse, not a true
picture of you, secret of the skyway.
A comet hit Proteus, birthing you.
I could walk across you in just one day.

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press) and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Asheville Literary Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere. @KenPobo