A cat caught on the kitchen counter with a slice of red onion and a lettuce leaf in his mouth is funny enough to carry a poem on its own. Dave Bonta treats him as a launch pad instead. In twenty lines the household comedy widens into a claim about what humans are: creatures who are rarely present where they are, and who end up watching their surroundings shrink to the size of the shrimp the poem began with.
The opening is deliberately trivial. "Prawns or shrimp?" sounds like a question asked while unpacking groceries, and the cat, who "likes them / either way," settles nothing. The humor builds through a ladder of mistaken identities: the cat is "quite sure he is a dog," the dog "of course thinks she is / a human." The deadpan "of course" does a lot of work, presenting these confusions as ordinary facts of the house. Then the ladder reaches its top rung, and the joke turns on us. "We humans are the most / curious of all." The word means both "inquisitive" and "odd," and the poem plainly intends the second sense. If the cat's delusion is amusing, ours is the biggest.
Our delusion is that "we are what we eat," a proverb the poem undermines at once: "it's seldom / that we're present for the eating." The next sentence shows how: "If we eat a salad, we're already looking / forward to the dessert." Notice that the salad has come back, now as a human habit rather than a cat's whim. The cat wholeheartedly commits to lettuce and onion, while we eat one thing and think about another. By this point the cat looks like the wiser animal.
The register then changes sharply. "Omnivores, / dwellers in the benthic zone" sounds like a nature documentary, and "benthic" is a precise, slightly chilly word for the bottom of a body of water. Humans have been moved to the seabed and filed alongside shrimp. Judging by the imagery, the "unusual tolerance for toxins" belongs to the same picture: bottom-dwelling scavengers are the creatures that take in whatever settles on them. The line can be read as dry praise or as quiet alarm, and the poem leaves it unresolved. The following sentence may borrow from the way shrimp flick themselves backward from danger: "Our strongest muscles pull us rapidly / away from wherever we happen / to find ourselves." Our greatest strength, in other words, goes into leaving.
The last two lines bring everything back to the title. The place we flee is something "we watch / recede into something no larger / than a shrimp." The sentence is built to recede as well. Its line breaks come at "happen," "which we watch," and "no larger," so each phrase hangs open until the next line arrives. The final line, "than a shrimp," is the shortest in the poem. The reader reaches the end of a long, gathering sentence and finds it has contracted to almost nothing. There is also an ambiguity worth noticing. If the world shrinks to a shrimp, we are the ones looking down on it, yet we have just been classed as shrimp-like creatures ourselves. The scale slides, and the reader can't be sure who is large and who is small.
Formally the poem is a single block of free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Its rhythm is that of someone telling an anecdote, helped by the casual "&" in line 4 and by enjambments that land on small comic beats: "a sudden / fan of salads," where "fan" briefly means both an enthusiast and a spread of leaves. A little sound-play ("sudden," "salads," "something") keeps the plain speech from going slack.
The poem is significant because it manages a serious thought without raising its voice. It never lectures about distraction, appetite, or our place among other animals. It lets a cat with a mouthful of lettuce raise those questions, then leaves us looking at a very small shrimp.