Two words and a full stop: "High heels." It reads like a caption under a photograph, or an item on a shopping list, and the flatness is deliberate. Dave Bonta sets the object down plainly, then spends ten more lines turning it over until we see both sides: what heels look like from outside, and what they feel like from within.
The first half belongs to the onlooker. The heels are "portable pinnacles," a phrase that jokes about height while borrowing the language of mountaineering. A pinnacle is something you climb, not something you strap to your feet. The verb that follows, "teeter," is just as exact. It is comic, a little wobble, but it also tells us the wearer is always about to lose her balance. The purpose arrives in the same breath: not her comfort, not even her pleasure, but "others' titillation." Those others are never named, and neither is the wearer. The poem has no "I" and no "she," only a body on display.
The cliff imagery keeps building. The back is "arched as if on the edge / of orgasm or some lovers' leap," and the line break falls right at "edge," so the verse itself seems to stand at a drop. "Lovers' leap" is the kind of name given to a cliff-top where, in folk legend, heartbroken lovers jump. By joining it to "orgasm" with a simple "or," the poem puts ecstasy and a fatal fall in the same slot. The words "as if" matter too. The arch only imitates ecstasy; it is a pose, not a feeling.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is a change of viewpoint, from the watcher to the watched. "The spine loses its spring / & the feet their feeling." The sentence is short and balanced, almost proverbial, and it drops the second "loses," so the damage seems to arrive faster than the grammar can keep up. "Spring" is a cruel word here, since lightness is what heels promise and what they take away. "Feeling" is cruel in another way. After all that talk of arousal, the body ends up with less sensation, not more. The ampersands, which appear twice, give the lines a brisk, matter-of-fact tone, like someone ticking off a list of injuries.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. This is free verse, and the consonants do the shaping. The hard t's of "portable," "teeter," and "titillation" tap like a heel on a hard floor. They return, cramped and crowded, in "Toes in a too-small toebox," where the repeated "oo" and "oe" sounds are awkward to say quickly. The mouth, like the toes, has to squeeze through a tight space. "Jostle & twist" adds a scuffle of s-sounds and a sense of bodies pushed against each other.
The final image is the poem's sharpest. The line breaks on "like," holding us a moment before the simile lands: "a litter of kittens / tied up in a sack." "Kittens" comes first, soft and small and appealing, and "tied up in a sack" undoes it at once. The phrase recalls the old cruelty of disposing of unwanted litters, though the poem never says so. Toes become small, helpless animals, and the shoe becomes a bag that holds them in. The cuteness is the point. The softness that makes something charming is also what makes it easy to hurt.
The poem's shape follows this fall. It starts on a pinnacle, with cliffs, edges, and leaps, and it ends in a sack, in the dark, with something small struggling. The grand language belongs to the person looking, and the humble, hurting language belongs to the person wearing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it argues. It never lectures about fashion or gender. It lets the same object be glamorous in one line and cruel in another, and it trusts the reader to feel the gap. In eleven lines it makes us ask who the display is for, and who pays for it.