Dave Bonta's "Purge" gives away its real subject in the first two lines: "Not quite rid / of myself." The clearing-out is not of a cupboard but of a person. The question "what / is best to keep?" is the one we ask over any pile of belongings, but here the pile seems to be made of books, habits and a whole way of being. The central idea is that a self can set hard, like concrete, and that removing it is both necessary and unfinished. The title carries the same ambiguity. A purge can be a tidy-up, a religious cleansing or a bodily emptying, and the poem lets all three meanings hover.
The middle of the poem is its strangest stretch. "According to / instructions received / from the Lord" sounds like office paperwork, as if divine commands arrived in the post. What the instructions say is tangled: pleasure is "a question / that I should / not understand," and the speaker's "mouth ought / to rage." Both verbs, "should" and "ought," belong to the language of duty rather than desire. The speaker reports these orders without endorsing them, and the flat, bureaucratic phrasing suggests some distance from them, though the poem never says so outright. Then comes a blunt "But," and the thought swerves.
What follows is the poem's most compact image: "my books had been flags / without a country / and I a pen." A flag signals allegiance, but with no country behind it, it is only cloth. The books, then, were declarations of loyalty to nothing in particular. The grammar of "and I a pen" drops the verb altogether, and the self shrinks to a tool for making marks, with no "was" to give it any life of its own. The past perfect "had been" suggests the speaker is already looking back on this state from outside it.
The aphorism that follows is the poem's pivot: "Cold cannot love / the winter, or / a drunk his drink." The hard *c* sounds in "cold cannot" and the clipped repetition in "drunk his drink" make the line feel like a closing door. The logic is unsettling. Being wholly made of something, or wholly given over to it, is not the same as loving it. Numbness and compulsion can look like devotion from outside, and the line seems to describe a self so saturated in its own habits that it can no longer feel them. That prepares the wish that follows: "Wishing that / the heart might / knock again." The heart becomes a door, or a visitor who has stopped calling. The modest "might" matters, because the speaker hopes and does not promise.
The form does a lot of this work quietly. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run two to four words and nearly every one is enjambed, so sentences arrive in small handfuls, like objects lifted out one at a time. Many lines end on weak, hesitant words such as "of," "that," "to" and "or," which leaves the reader hanging on the edge of each thought. The tone stays conversational and almost deadpan until the last sentence: "I am taking out / a prodigious / quantity of / hardened self." The present tense makes the purge happen as we read. "Prodigious," the poem's one grand, Latinate word, has a faint comedy and a real awe in it, since the amount is huge. The line breaks hold back the noun until the final line, so "hardened self" lands with weight, echoing the cold and the winter earlier on. The poem ends on "self," the word it began circling in "myself."
The poem is worth reading because it refuses a neat redemption. It borrows the vocabulary of housework (keeping, sorting, taking out) to talk about spiritual and emotional shedding, and it admits the job is incomplete. The opening question about what to keep is never answered. Action replaces the answer, and the heart has not yet knocked by the final line. That honesty, packed into so few words, gives the poem its quiet force.