The warmest spot in the apartment, it turns out, is the top of the refrigerator. With that detail Dave Bonta begins "Privation," a poem about a couple living with very little. It never uses the word "poor" and never explains why the apartment is so cold. It lets objects speak instead: a cat, an appliance, a stained ceiling, a pair of hipbones. By the end, the title's idea of lack has become something stranger and warmer. The poem suggests that scarcity pushes two people so close together that they leave marks on each other, and that those marks are a kind of wealth.
The construction is quiet. The poem has five tercets, free verse with no rhyme, and almost no punctuation. Lines begin in lowercase, and the only full stop arrives at the very end. This keeps the voice casual and murmuring, like someone remembering. The repeated "would" ("the refrigerator would cycle off," "the cat's tail would twitch," "we would lower our voices") makes these habitual events, things that happened again and again. The poem seems to look back on a routine rather than a single night, and the gentleness of its tone suggests the memory is not a bitter one.
The first two stanzas are about the cat and the machine, not the people. The humans do not appear until the third stanza, and then only as "we." Delaying them makes the cold feel like the main character of the room. There is also a small irony in the choice of heat source: the cat sits on the refrigerator, an object built to make things cold, because its motor happens to give off warmth. When it "cycle[s] off / with a violent shiver," the machine seems to shudder like a living thing. With no punctuation after "shiver," the next line, "the cat's tail would twitch," runs straight on, so the shudder seems to pass from the fridge into the animal.
The silence "that followed" is the poem's hinge. Only when the hum stops do we realise how much background noise the couple had been living with. In that quiet, they "lower our voices / & move closer together." The ampersand, a quick and informal mark, keeps the movement light and almost unthinking, as if closeness were a reflex. The lowered voices are partly tenderness, but the next stanza suggests another reason: "the walls were thin as takeout menus." The simile is cheap, paper-flimsy and domestic. It tells us that sound travels, and that neighbours may hear everything. Judging by the image, there is also a hint of hunger. The walls are compared to menus, not to the meals themselves, which may point to food that is imagined rather than eaten, though the poem leaves that open.
The ceiling's stain "in the shape of Antarctica" is the funniest and most revealing image. Antarctica is the coldest, emptiest continent, and the stain maps that cold onto the room above their heads. It also gives the couple a wry, shared joke. They look up at the damp patch and see a frozen landmass, as if they were two explorers at the bottom of the world. Humour is one way people survive hardship, and here it keeps the poem from self-pity.
The last stanza delivers the title's real meaning: "we each had bruises / on our hips from / the other's hipbones." The line breaks are worth noticing. "On our hips from" hangs in the air for a moment before "the other's hipbones" lands. The word "each" matters because the injury is mutual, and the final full stop comes right after "hipbones," a hard, bony word, so the poem ends with a small click. The image works on two levels. It points to thin bodies, which suggests that the privation is physical. But the bruises are also the trace of closeness, whether in sleep or in love. Hardship has left marks, but they are marks the two people made on each other.
That balance is what makes the poem significant. It could have been a complaint about poverty or a sentimental claim that love conquers all. It does neither. It keeps its eye on small, exact things and lets the reader feel the double meaning of "privation": the lack, and what the lack produced. In fifteen short lines, the coldest apartment becomes the place where two people are warmest.