Eighteen words and a single sentence are enough for Dave Bonta to stage a whole small drama of drink, desire and religion. A drunk man fixes his attention on a woman's gloves, decides they are a church, and preaches to them while he drinks. The poem is funny, but the comedy has a lonely edge. Longing that cannot reach a person settles on an object, and the object is made holy.
The first line sets the tone with "Drunk, I home in". The confession comes first, before any explanation, and the verb is telling. To "home in" is to navigate with precision, like a missile or a pigeon, yet the speaker is too unsteady for precision. The drink has narrowed his world to one target. The word "home" also hints at what he may be missing. He is drawn to something that looks like shelter. The target is "her fine gloves", not her face or her hands, and that choice matters. Gloves are what hands leave behind, or what covers them. Either way, the speaker settles on the thing that stands between him and her. "Fine" suggests elegance and a refinement the speaker may feel he lacks. The title "Handy" adds a pun. Gloves are conveniently at hand, but the woman's hands, the part that would be useful, are not on offer. The poem never says whether she is present or has simply left her gloves behind, and both readings work.
The colon after "gloves" works like an equals sign: gloves, then church. The metaphor seems to grow from the shape of the object itself. Gloves are hollow spaces made to hold something living, as a church holds a congregation. If the fingers are pressed together, they might even suggest hands joined in prayer, though that is my inference. What matters is that the congregation is empty or silent. The sermon is one-way speech, which makes the preacher faintly ridiculous and rather sad.
The syntax makes the joke work. "a church I give / a sermon to" is inverted, with the object fronted, so the sentence sounds slightly liturgical, or slightly tangled, as drunken speech can be. The line break adds a flicker of confusion. After "a church I give" you briefly expect a gift, as if the speaker were donating a church, before "a sermon to" arrives and rights the grammar. The stranded "to" at the end of the line leaves the sentence hanging, and the reader has to hold the sentence together as the speaker struggles to.
The last line, "while I sup", completes the parody. "Sup" is an old, slightly churchy word, close to supper and to the communion table, but it also just means to drink. The speaker is therefore priest and parishioner at once, delivering the sermon and taking the sacrament, and the sacrament is the drink in his hand. The line is also the shortest in the poem. The first four lines each run to four syllables, and "while I sup" has only three, so the poem ends like a sip, a little short of what was expected.
Though the poem has no end rhyme, its sounds are carefully managed. The short, thick *u* of "Drunk", "gloves" and "sup" appears near the start, in the middle and at the very end, as if the poem keeps circling back to appetite. Against this stand "church" and "sermon", which share an r-coloured vowel and sound more grave. The poem's two worlds, holy and boozy, are kept apart in sound even as the grammar forces them together. The speaker also appears three times as "I", each time as the subject of a verb (home in, give, sup), while the woman exists only as "her". All the action belongs to him, and she is reduced to what he projects onto her possessions.
The poem is significant for how much it carries in so little space. It never says whether the speaker is mocking himself, pitying himself or quietly adoring someone, and that ambiguity is its strength. The tiny form suits the subject, since a drunk's field of vision shrinks to one point and the poem shrinks with it. What we are left with is devotion and appetite blurred together, and no one answering the sermon.