Dave Bonta's "Smell Pox" begins with a loss so small it is almost a shrug: "I lost my sense of smell for just two days." The word "just" plays it down, and the plainness holds for the whole poem. Nothing in it is raised to a shout. Yet by the end, a sniffly morning and a pale moon have become a way of talking about living without reliable information.
The poem is built like a haibun, prose paragraphs each followed by a short three-line verse. The prose is conversational, with long sentences that wander. In the first paragraph the speaker stops mid-thought to remember childhood Januaries, when the temperature rose above freezing only "toward the end of the month, a little false spring we called January Thaw." The phrase "false spring" is the poem's first quiet key. A thaw is a pleasant lie that the weather tells, and the speaker's reaction is wary rather than delighted. The returning smell of soil "still surprises me this time of year," which suggests that the senses, like the season, can announce something the calendar doesn't back up.
The verses that follow are much sparser. "white clippings / from my haircut / winter garden" has no punctuation and no rhyme, and it doesn't follow the strict five-seven-five pattern often taught for haiku. It gives two images and leaves the reader to connect them. The clippings might lie pale against snow or frozen ground. Because the paragraph before it ended on the smell of soil, they also suggest something shed by the body and returned to the earth. "White" could mean snow, or age, or simply a lack of colour. The poem doesn't choose, and that openness is part of its effect.
The second paragraph moves from the speaker's body to a named person, Rachel, and from the smell of soil to something harder to sense. Her ten-day quarantine ends with an unsettled diagnosis: "what might've been the common cold," while five colleagues "tested positive for Covid." The grammar shows the problem. Both "might've been" and "might be infectious or immune" are modal verbs, the language of maybe. The speaker then drops into blunt speech: "That's the hell of it." The shift from "I" to the generalising "one" widens the problem from one household to everyone living through the same fog. The poem never calls this fear. It calls it "the not knowing," and the whole poem is built around that phrase.
The closing verse is the strangest and best. "winter / afternoon moon / where's your shadow." Placing "winter" alone on the first line gives it weight, and it repeats the season of the first verse so the two halves frame each other. A moon in daylight is a real, visible thing that seems out of place, much like a thaw in January. Asking where its shadow is turns the moon into a body that should leave a mark on the world and doesn't. Read against Rachel's story, this is an eerie picture of an invisible threat, or an invisible lack of one. A person might carry the virus without a symptom, or have it without knowing, or be spared without proof. The question has no answer, and the poem leaves it hanging without a full stop.
The title seems to coin a mock-disease name that echoes older plague names. That fits the poem's dry humour, which lets the speaker joke slightly about something frightening, and it also fixes on smell, the sense that vanishes first and returns first.
The poem matters because it avoids the big gestures a pandemic might invite. It stays with small things like a haircut, a garden, a colleague's quarantine and a moon, and trusts them to carry the feeling. Its two halves rhyme in idea rather than sound. Each pairs a plain statement of fact with an image that refuses to settle, and the effect is that of a period when even the weather and the body gave unreliable signals.