Dave Bonta's "In Common" begins like a science column and ends in a field with a hawk overhead. It opens with a claim: if a computer blends hundreds of faces, the result looks like a supermodel. From that, the poem draws a distinction that carries everything after it. "What is average is not necessarily common, and vice versa." The blended face is average, yet no real person has it. Each of us contributes "our own small part," and the sum is "conventionally beautiful," while we remain, singly, "uncommonly beautiful." The central idea is that we are most ourselves when we are least average, and that something shared still needs each of us to give a little of ourselves to it.
The form helps make this argument. Prose paragraphs alternate with two short three-line verses in the manner of haiku, though they don't follow a strict syllable count. The prose is plain and conversational, built from short declarative sentences and rhetorical questions ("who wants to take a chance on being average?"). The verses cut away from argument to what the speaker sees. There is no rhyme anywhere, which suits a poem about resisting the smooth, averaged-out version of things. Instead it relies on echoes. "Common" keeps changing meaning: shared in the title, ordinary in the second paragraph, and widespread in "as common as COVID." The poem lets one word do several jobs, so the reader feels the ideas sliding into each other.
The imagery keeps returning to faces. After the supermodel, the first verse offers "a harrow's / yellow teeth." A harrow is a farm tool that rakes over soil, and its yellowed teeth are rusty, worn and unglamorous. They are also teeth, part of a face, and I read them as a deliberate counterweight to the flawless composite. The line break after "harrow's" leaves the possessive hanging for a moment before the blunt image lands. Then comes the equinox, "perfectly average" in its balance of day and night, and the speaker watches the sunrise redden the ridge "as flushed as the face of my British wife after one drink." Landscape and loved person briefly become one image. That warm, specific, slightly tipsy face is the opposite of an average one.
The most striking moment comes right after: "My uncommonly beautiful lover, whom I see now only by web conferencing software. The soft wear of her. The solid-state drive of her." The fragments are wordplay. "Soft wear" splits "software" in two, so it suggests both a program and the gentle wear of something loved and handled. A solid-state drive stores data with no moving parts, which makes it a fitting image for memory that holds a person in place while she is far away. Because the poem mentions COVID, the separation reads as pandemic distance, though that is an inference from the text. The tone is tender, a little comic, and a little sad, because affection has to borrow the vocabulary of machines.
The last paragraph widens the lens. The "dilemma" is that statistics may protect us individually ("the law of averages may be on our side"), yet no one wants to be the average case. The proposed way out is that "we each contribute our piecemeal vulnerability to the common good." This echoes the earlier "small part" but changes what is being given. In the opening, each of us offers a feature. Here we offer our weakness, and the poem treats that as the real shared resource.
The final verse refuses to settle the matter: "marsh hawk / the draft horses with / their blinders on." The hawk is a predator, and the horses are working animals that pull harrows, so the image links back to the first verse. The horses might be heroic, bearing a shared load, or foolish, shutting out danger. The break after "with" leaves the line open, much as blinders narrow a view. The poem does not say which reading is right.
What makes the poem significant is how much it fits into so little space. It turns a statistical curiosity into a love poem, a love poem into a comment on public life, and it never lets the personal disappear into the general. It asks what we owe the group without pretending that the answer is simple.