Ten words, ten syllables, no verb. Dave Bonta's «Object» is built like a riddle with the answer withheld. Something, or someone, is "a piece of meat" at noon and "a mouth" at night, and the poem never says who or what that is. The title only tells us we are looking at an object, a thing rather than a person, and the two lines show how a thing can be seen differently depending on the hour.
The first image is cold and a little brutal. Meat is flesh with the life taken out of it, and "piece" makes it worse, because a piece has already been cut from something larger. Noon adds to this. It is the hour of full light and lunch, when everything is exposed and nothing casts a shadow. Meat at noon is something laid out to be looked at, handled and used. If the "object" is a human body, as the title and the flesh-language invite us to suspect, then this is the daytime gaze that sees a person as a cut of something edible. The poem doesn't insist on that reading, but it makes it hard to avoid.
The second line turns the picture around. A piece of meat is passive, while a mouth is the part of the body that eats, speaks, kisses, bites and complains. Night takes away the visual world, and what is left is appetite and voice. Read this way, the poem is about a reversal: the thing that was consumed at midday becomes the thing that consumes after dark. The title helps here, because "object" is also a verb. A mouth can object. The grammar adds to the effect, since an object in the grammatical sense is what is acted upon, and by the second line this object has started to act.
The poem also resists that hopeful reading. A mouth is still only a part, just as a piece is. Neither line gives us a whole person, a name or a pronoun. Both nouns come with the indefinite article ("a piece," "a mouth"), never "the" and never "her" or "his." So the poem can be read two ways: as the object gaining a kind of power, or as the object being cut down to a different fragment as the hours pass. Meat becomes mouth, but nobody arrives to claim either one. The poem lets both readings stand and doesn't settle between them.
The construction supports all this quietly. The lines mirror each other: "at noon… at night…", with the same preposition, the same article, the same rhythm of a time followed by a thing. The rhythm is regular. "At NOON a PIECE of MEAT" is a clean three-beat iambic line, and "at NIGHT a MOUTH" is the same pattern cut to two beats. The second line is shorter and arrives sooner than the ear expects, so the poem ends abruptly, like a mouth closing. There is no rhyme, but the sound is carefully matched. "Noon" and "night" both begin with n, and "meat" and "mouth" both begin with m, so each word in the second line answers its counterpart in the first. "Meat" ends on a hard, closed t, while "mouth" ends on the breathy th, which stays open a moment longer. The absence of punctuation and capitals, and the missing "is," keep the lines flat and factual. Nothing is described as being or becoming. Each time of day is simply labeled.
Even the white space between the lines can be read as part of the poem. It stands for the hours between noon and night, and everything that happens in them is left out.
The poem is significant because it does so much with so little. It borrows the shape of a proverb or riddle and uses it to ask who gets to be a subject and who is treated as an object, and when. A longer poem might have argued the point. This one gives us two images and leaves the reader to supply the person, the speaker and the judgment, which is a way of making us take part in the looking. That may be the sharpest effect of all: by the end, the reader has had to decide what is being looked at.