The word in the title never appears again. Dave Bonta's "Nipple" circles its subject through five small definitions, each a fresh metaphor, like a dictionary entry written by someone who won't settle for one meaning. The poem's argument is that one of the body's smallest and most ordinary parts is also a meeting point for communication, scale, sensitivity and the unconscious.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is held together by sound and shape instead. It is five tercets, and each opens with a short noun phrase beginning with M: "Mouthpiece," "Mountain peak," "Mouse-pink," "Missed bit," "Mouthpiece." The m is a lips-closed hum, the sound of a mouth about to settle on something, so the repeated letter quietly echoes the poem's subject. The stanzas work like labels in a glossary: a name first, then a few lines that unfold it. Verbs are scarce ("makes," "is," "can't speak"), which leaves the imagery doing most of the work.
The opening and closing stanzas frame the poem around a single word whose meaning shifts. At first the "mouthpiece" belongs to an instrument: the body is something played or blown, and the nipple is where a mouth meets it. Then comes a paradox: "Its silence is another language." The nipple makes no sound, yet the line insists it communicates, and the poem leaves open what it says. By the last stanza the mouthpiece is a scuba diver's, and the music has become breath. A diver's mouthpiece sustains life, much as a nipple does for a newborn, but it also silences: "The scuba diver / can't speak." That final line is only three syllables of plain statement, and the poem stops as abruptly as a speaker cut off, so the form enacts the silence it describes.
The middle stanzas play with scale. "Mountain peak" turns a tiny part of the body into landscape, and "It makes its own / wet weather" is shrewd about real mountains, which gather clouds around themselves. The line break after "own" lends the nipple a kind of independence. Judging by the imagery, it responds to cold, hunger or touch on its own terms rather than waiting for the conscious mind's permission. Then the poem drops from geology to something small and alive: "Mouse-pink / & sensitive as a newborn / through old age." The ampersand has a jotted, notebook casualness, and the short phrase "through old age" stretches a whole lifetime across the line. Skin elsewhere may toughen, but this stays as tender as it began.
The fourth stanza is the strangest and probably the key. "Missed bit / of a continent submerged / in the unconscious." "Missed bit" sounds homely, like a patch skipped while washing, and "continent" is huge, so the two are pulled against each other. The phrase suggests something overlooked that belongs to a much larger, mostly hidden map. It is easy to read this as a nod to the earliest experience of feeding, which lies before memory and language, though the poem never says so outright. What matters is the direction of travel. The poem begins on a mountaintop and ends underwater, moving from what is visible and bold to what is sunk and silent. The diver in the last stanza is, in effect, the reader being taken down into that submerged territory.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. The nipple is a body part that tends to be sexualised, embarrassed over or sentimentalised, and here it is approached with calm curiosity. The poem never says whose body it is and never settles on one role. It is a feeding tool, a sensor, a bit of weather, a remnant of an older world. The brevity does its own work too. By saying little and leaving white space around every stanza, the poem lets silence become part of its meaning, so that the reader senses "another language" at work between the lines.