Three short lines are enough to hold a whole long-distance relationship. Someone sits in front of a screen, sees a person they care about, and does what the body does without asking permission: reaches out. Dave Bonta's haiku records the moment just after that gesture, when the screen answers in place of the person.
The bracketed title, which reads like a label or a file name, tells us the situation: a video call. The central idea is a paradox. Touch is the most direct kind of contact, yet here it is what exposes the gap. The face looks close enough to touch, and the speaker touches it, but the only thing that moves is the display. Anyone who has pressed a fingertip against an LCD knows how the picture blooms and warps under the pressure. The poem takes that small physical fact and lets it carry a feeling.
The construction is spare. Counting "LCD" as three syllables, the lines run four, five and four, shorter than the 5-7-5 pattern often taught in school, and there is no rhyme. What the poem keeps from haiku is compression and a pivot. The colon after "LCD screen" works like a hinge: first a label, then an event. The poem also stops at the instant of the ripple, with no aftermath, so the reader is left with a finger still resting on the glass.
The word choice repays a slow look. "LCD" is cold, a three-letter abbreviation from a spec sheet. "Screen" is a good word to sit beside it, because it means both a display and something that shields or hides. The speaker's own screen is doing both jobs at once. Then the diction changes. "When I touch her face" is five one-syllable words in a row, plain and unhurried, each given equal weight, like a hand moving slowly toward something it doesn't want to startle. The only long word in the last two lines is "ripple," and it stands out for its sound as well as its meaning: the liquid *l*, the soft *p*'s, the unstressed ending that trails away like the movement it describes.
That word is also the poem's one real image, and it works in two ways. Literally, it describes the distortion of the pixels. Figuratively, it turns the screen into water and the face into a pond's surface, something you can look into but not hold, and something that breaks up when touched. Water suggests that the disturbance spreads outward, so a ripple can also be read as a flutter of feeling. The line says only "there's a ripple," without saying where. It could be in the image or in the speaker, and the poem doesn't choose.
Two small choices deepen the mood. The first is "when" rather than "if." The speaker doesn't wonder whether touching the screen will do anything; they have clearly done it before, and expect to do it again. Knowing it disturbs the picture doesn't stop the impulse, and that quiet persistence is where the poem's tenderness lives. The second is that "her" is never explained. She might be a partner, a child, a parent or a friend, and by withholding that, the poem lets nearly any reader supply the person they would reach for.
As for what makes the poem significant, haiku traditionally turns on a small event in the natural world, noticed with full attention. Bonta moves that habit of attention into a very modern setting, a room with a glowing rectangle in it. Nature slips back in anyway, through the water of "ripple," as if the poem couldn't find another way to say how fragile the connection feels. There are no complaints about technology and no declaration of missing anyone. There isn't even an adjective. All the emotion is carried by a gesture and its small consequence.
The software named in the title may date, but the gesture won't. The device is built to make an absent person present, and the poem notices the seam. The screen does respond to the touch, so it offers comfort, but it responds as a surface and not as a person, so it also admits the distance. Both readings hold at once in the last line, and the poem needs only that line to say so.