Nine words, one dash, and two meanings pressed so tightly together that neither can be pulled free. Dave Bonta's "Miscarriage" opens with a word that lives in two worlds. In the body, a miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy. In law, a miscarriage of justice is a trial that has gone wrong. The poem never says which it means. The final line, "in the court," lets the legal sense walk in while the bodily sense stays in the room, and the poem is about the clash between them.
The central idea sits in the middle line: "a life-like lack of heart." "Heart" can be read literally, as the heartbeat that is missing or has stopped. It can also be read figuratively, as compassion or courage, the sense we use when we say someone has "lost heart" or has no heart at all. The poem lets both readings stand. Judging by the wording, it suggests that a court which handles human loss without feeling is failing in the same way as the pregnancy that ends: something that should have been carried through has not been.
The most unsettling choice is "life-like." The hyphen splits the word into "life" and "like," which makes us hear it as "like life" rather than "alive." A lifelike thing is a waxwork or a mannequin, something with the right shape and no pulse. That fits a courtroom, where robes, procedure and ritual can all look like justice while the living centre is absent. It also fits a miscarriage, which has the outline of a life without the life itself. The phrase is paradoxical, too, because it describes a lack, an absence, as if the absence were imitating a presence. The emptiness has to be convincing before we notice it.
The construction is as spare as the idea. Three lines run three, six and three syllables, so the poem does not follow the five-seven-five count of the strict haiku pattern, though its compression and its short, open-ended shape recall that tradition. The long middle line swells between two short ones, and you could hear that as the body between its frame. There is no verb anywhere, so nothing happens in the poem. Nothing is completed, which suits a subject about failure to complete. The dash after "miscarriage" sets the word alone for a moment, like a diagnosis delivered before anyone has found what to say. The lowercase opening and the missing full stop leave the poem open at the end as well.
The sound does quiet work. "Life-like lack" is a run of soft, liquid l's that almost lulls, and then the line closes on "heart." The last line answers with "court," so the two line-endings share the same closing -rt sound, a slant rhyme that clicks shut like a latch. Because "court" is the only stressed word in its line, it lands with the weight of a gavel. The hard k sounds in "miscarriage," "like," "lack" and "court" run through the poem as a thin thread of dryness beneath the softness. There may be further echoes. "Heart" and "court" also meet in a pack of cards, where hearts have their court cards, and "court" can mean to woo. The poem does not insist on either, but the words are close enough to suggest them.
Part of the poem's significance lies in what it makes us notice about a common word. "Miscarriage" begins with "mis-," the prefix of wrongness, and ends in "carriage," the idea of carrying or conducting something. In both medicine and law, the word describes a failure to carry something through, and the poem lets that ordinary, almost invisible metaphor surface. It also shows how a word can pass between private grief and public institution, with neither fully at home in the other.
The poem gives no story, no named case and no speaker's feelings, and it offers no verdict. It sets two situations side by side and lets a single missing organ connect them. The reader is left with a hard question: if a court has no heart, is it still the living thing it appears to be, or only a very good likeness?