Three lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a whole working day squeezed inside them. Dave Bonta's "On the fly" gives us a person at a desk, too occupied to stop, grabbing food while everything else carries on. The scene is so ordinary that it is easy to read past, which is exactly what the speaker does with his own meal.
The title does the quietest and cleverest work. "On the fly" is an everyday idiom for doing something in a hurry, in passing, without proper attention. But a fly is also a winged creature, and the last line hands us a wing. Most likely it is a chicken wing, the kind of food you can eat with one hand while the other stays on the keyboard, but the poem never says so. The word is left doubled: a snack, and also the part of an animal that once let it fly. The idiom turns literal. The speaker eats on the fly, and what he eats is the very organ of flight. The irony is that the one who stays put, bound to the office and to his tasks, is the human.
The structure reinforces this. The sentence reads as one unbroken run: "at the office, busy about business, I eat a wing." Notice that the "I" does not arrive until the final line. Two lines of setting and busyness come first, and only then does a person appear, as if the self were an afterthought in its own working day. The middle line can also glance in two directions, describing the speaker or simply the atmosphere of the place. With no commas, there is no pause in which anyone could take a breath.
The sound of the middle line is where the poem plays most. "Busy about business" is the longest line, and its unstressed syllables tumble forward in a way that feels hurried. Its repeated "biz" sound, in "busy" and again in "business", hums like an insect, which quietly answers the title's fly. The phrase is also a kind of loop. "Business" is built from "busy" (it literally means busy-ness), so the speaker is busy about busy-ness. We are never told what the business actually is. That vagueness seems to be the point: this is activity with no stated purpose, motion for its own sake.
After that rush, the last line slows right down. "I eat a wing" is four short, blunt, one-syllable words, and it lands like a bite. It also moves the poem from the abstract to the physical. "Office" and "business" are ideas and institutions, while a wing is something you can taste, grease and all. The body, with its plain appetite, interrupts the world of schedules.
There is no end rhyme, and the poem doesn't need any. The sound ties run inside the lines instead. A short "i" threads through "office," "busy," "business" and "wing," so that the poem begins and ends on the same small vowel, and the last word seems to answer the first line. The shape is short, long, short, with about four syllables, then six or seven, then four. That pattern recalls haiku in its brevity and its pairing of a setting with one small action, though the poem does not seem to follow a strict syllable count, and it is better read on its own terms.
Its tone is deadpan. The speaker doesn't complain or comment, and he doesn't say whether he enjoys the wing, resents the work, or even notices either. He just reports. That restraint makes the poem more pointed than an outright protest would be, because the reader supplies the judgment. We see someone eating without tasting, living without looking up.
What makes the poem worth attention is how much it carries in so little space. In three lines it holds a pun, a pattern of sound, a shift from abstract to concrete, and a small, wry diagnosis of working life. It also leaves the reader with a question: when did you last eat something without being busy about something else?