High Definition by John C. Mannone

I sink into my leather chair,

half drift off on soft cushions,

flip on the remote and pop

the aluminum tab off a Bud.

First, The Weather Channel:

the Gulf, with its typical August

hurricane churning Cuban waters

from green to battered gray.

Same old-same old.

I switch to Channel 42, Ah!

All that jazz and drum snares,

syncopated trumpets—music

washing over me, I float

in that sea of leather.

I take another sip of beer,

suspend in high definition—

in that silk of sound

before another damned crash

of infomercials on my ears.

I click over to ESPN:

Saints against Tampa Bay

Buccaneers. It’s raining

and the score is tied at halftime.

The Clydesdales’ white-capped

hooves beat mud and the screen

blinks & rasters turning them

into red brown blurs on chartreuse,

So I switch to CNN, to another

part of the world in wake

of that hurricane—African coast.

I hear pleas for aid. Emaciated

children drowning

with hunger.

They are gasping to breathe

the last air of hope. I crush

the empty beer can. Stuff the last

of that Po Boy into my mouth

and turn-off the plasma TV.

I stare at the blank screen

after the electric discharge

crinkles air as if some static

hum dissolves like beer froth

collapsing on glass, sliding down

the wall of an empty mug.

John C. Mannone has work in Adanna Literary Journal, Anacua Literary Arts Journal, and Number One, and in Artemis, Poetry South, Human/Kind Journal, Red Coyote, Blue Fifth Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Baltimore Review, and others. He won a Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian literature (2017) and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He’s a retired professor of physics living between Knoxville and Chattanooga, TN. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com