Few poems open with a boast as gleeful as "I eat my enemies by the handful." It sounds like the war cry of a mythic hunter, until the next lines shrink the enemy to "spicy leaves of the invasive / garlic mustard." The grand claim collapses into a snack, and the joke is that the speaker means it. Eating the weeds is how he fights back. Poet Dave Bonta turns an ecological grievance into a meal, and the mock-heroic tone keeps the poem from becoming a lecture about invasive species.
The line breaks do a lot of the work. "Invasive" hangs at the end of its line, so the reader waits a beat for the noun. Then "garlic mustard" gets a short line to itself, and the plain, almost kitchen-sounding name lands like a taste. The first line is the longest in the poem and has a loose, rolling beat, with the stress falling on "eat," "enemies" and "handful." After that, the lines get shorter and quieter, as if the bravado were draining away.
The second stanza reverses the situation. "Back home, I strip" is only four syllables, and the break after "strip" makes the undressing abrupt, almost startling. The hunter is now the one under inspection, standing in front of the mirror "checking for ticks." The word "enemies" returns here in a different form. The plants were enemies only in a figurative, political sense, while ticks are literal parasites with appetites of their own. The title's plural, "appetites," begins to make sense. The speaker eats the invaders, and something small and hungry may be eating him. The hard consonants in "checking for ticks" even sound like the fingernail-and-tweezers work of searching a body. The poem never says the speaker is afraid, but the careful, naked scrutiny suggests a wary awareness of how exposed a person is outdoors.
Then the poem shifts its gaze entirely. The "I" disappears from the final stanza, and the speaker turns from the mirror to the window, from looking at himself to looking out. A squirrel passes "with bulging cheeks, / carrying one of her young." The image rhymes visually with the opening. Both speaker and squirrel have a full mouth, and both are busy in spring. But the squirrel's mouth is not full of food. It holds a baby. What looks like eating is actually carrying, and appetite becomes protection. The phrase "one of her young" implies a litter, so the squirrel is probably in the middle of a larger job, though the poem leaves that unstated.
Sound ties the three scenes together quietly. The "s" and "p" sounds of "spring," "spicy," "strip" and "squirrel" thread through the poem like a repeated breath. The lines have no rhyme and no fixed meter, only the ordinary rhythm of speech. The structure is three tercets, each a small scene, set side by side without explanation. This is close in spirit to haiku, which also relies on juxtaposed images, although the poem does not follow the 5-7-5 count. The reader has to supply the connections, and the connections are what make the poem.
What emerges is a small, honest picture of where a person fits in the natural world. The speaker begins as an aggressor, a human sorting good plants from bad. By the end he is one animal among others: something to be fed on, something to be checked over, and a watcher at the glass while another creature does what living things do in spring. The poem never states a moral. It lets hunger, fear and care appear in a single day and trusts the reader to notice that they are all versions of the same drive to survive and to protect what comes next.
That restraint is its real achievement. In twelve short lines, Bonta moves from comic swagger to physical vulnerability to quiet tenderness without raising his voice. The poem suggests that appetite is not simply something we use against the world. It also ties us to it, and it makes room for the gentlest act in the poem, a mother carrying her young.