Fifteen syllables, one dash, not a single capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Claw" is small enough to read as a snapshot, but the snapshot catches someone becoming strange to himself. A man is dressed in his old suit and about to receive the sacrament. Then he looks at his own outstretched hand and sees a lobster's.
The poem is built as a slow reveal, though the title gives the game away. "Claw" is the word the poem never says. The last line says "hand of a lobster," which gives a crustacean a human word, so the comparison runs in both directions. The man's hand turns into a claw, and the claw becomes oddly hand-like. By the time we reach the end, the title has already named what we're about to see, and the line works like a translation of it. This makes the poem feel less like a riddle than like a recognition, the way you notice your own reflection in a shop window before you realise it's you.
The rhythm supports this. The lines run four, six and five syllables. That is close to the haiku count without obeying it, and the looseness suits a poem about a body that doesn't quite fit the occasion. The middle line is the longest, and it carries the ritual: "to take the sacrament" has a slow, processional tread, with the Latinate weight of its last word. Then the dash, which acts as a held breath or a pause with the hand halfway out, and the poem drops into the short, blunt "hand of a lobster." The syntax is fragmentary. There is no "I" and no main verb, only "my" in the first line to tell us whose suit this is. The poem describes a posture rather than an action, so the reader is left standing in the pew holding the same moment.
There is no rhyme, but the sounds are tightly tuned. "Suit," "sacrament" and "lobster" all share s and t sounds, so the solemn word sits between two ordinary ones and is quietly linked to them. "Sacrament" and "lobster" also end the same way, on a weak syllable (-ment, -ster). The third line therefore lands with the same soft step as the second, only with a change in register. That change is the comedy of the poem. "Sacrament" is the tallest word here, and "lobster" is the one that makes us half-smile, since it belongs on a restaurant menu rather than in a church.
The imagery of the suit is worth a second look. Judging by the poem, the suit is "old," so it is probably worn for occasions rather than for everyday life, and a stiff, formal outer layer around a soft body is a fair description of a lobster too. A hand sticking out of a suit sleeve could look like a claw emerging from a shell. The poem doesn't push this reading, but the pairing of clothing and carapace is there for anyone who wants it.
The most interesting tension is in the verb. We "take" the sacrament, but in the ritual of communion the hand is meant to be open and receiving. A claw is built to grip, pinch and hold on. The poem lets those two ideas press against each other without deciding between them. The hand might be stiff with age, or awkward with self-consciousness, or the speaker might simply be seeing, in a moment that is meant to be elevated, how creaturely he is. The poem doesn't say whether he is a believer, a doubter or just someone who turned up in the suit, and that silence is what keeps it honest.
What makes "Claw" worth reading is how much it carries in so little space. It holds reverence and absurdity in the same hand, and it trusts a single image to do the work of an argument. A longer poem might have explained what it means to approach the holy in an ageing, animal body. This one only shows the hand, and we have to decide for ourselves whether to laugh, wince or bow our heads.