Dave Bonta's six-line poem begins as a joke and ends with a hole where a house should be. The speaker announces, in the flat tone of a prescription label, "I take a pill for a wife." Everything after that depends on the little word "for." It could mean "in place of," so that the pill has taken over the wife's role. It could also mean "to cure," so that the wife, or the pain of her absence, is the condition being treated. The poem never chooses, and that refusal drives it.
The title adds another layer. "A taste of her own medicine" is a stock phrase for being repaid in your own coin. Here the idiom is bent until it is almost literal: there is medicine, and it is being swallowed. Yet the poem's second line, "a pretty lady made of loss and ash," reads less like revenge than like mourning. "Ash" suggests burning, and judging by the imagery she may be dead, though the poem doesn't say so. A pill is also a powder pressed into shape, so the wife seems to have been ground down into the very thing the speaker takes. The phrase "pretty lady" sounds casual, even faintly patronising, as if the speaker is trying not to sound as shaken as he is. Notice too how the line slides from "loss," an abstraction, to "ash," something you could hold in your hand.
The second couplet turns bitter and self-aware. "What a fable this is" works in two ways. A fable is a story with a moral, but calling something a fable also suggests it is made up, a tale we tell ourselves. Then comes "getting her out of the way to drink," where "drink" is wonderfully unstable. It might mean washing the pill down with water, or it might mean alcohol, with the wife shoved aside so the real business can begin. Either way she is treated as an obstacle, and the speaker sounds amused and uncomfortable at once, as though he knows the story he is telling about himself is not flattering. Perhaps the fable's moral is how easily grief becomes an excuse.
The last couplet is the only place where the voice lifts into song. "O door without a house / door gone like a pill" opens with an old-fashioned apostrophe, the kind of address you might expect in a hymn. After the dry humour, it lands hard. A door without a house is an absurd picture, a frame you could walk through and arrive nowhere. It is also an exact image of what remains when a home or marriage falls away: the way in and out survives, but there is nothing inside. Then even the door vanishes "like a pill," swallowed and dissolved. The pill that began as the wife's replacement ends as a measure of disappearance. The repeated words "door" and "pill" bind the stanza together, and "pill" opens and closes the poem like bookends.
The form is spare. There are three couplets, no rhyme, no punctuation and almost no capitals. The first line has a lilting three-beat swing, "I TAKE a PILL for a WIFE," close to a nursery rhyme, which makes the dark content sound like the setup to a gag. The second line stretches out, and then the poem tightens into short, incantatory phrases. Without full stops, the lines run into each other the way a mood does, and the speaker never gets a pause to compose himself. Soft sounds, the l's and p's of "pill," "pretty," "lady," "loss" and "fable," give the whole thing a muffled, medicated feel.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it compresses. In six lines it holds comedy and grief, a twisted idiom, a hint of addiction and a final image of emptiness. Its ambiguity is not vagueness but honesty. The speaker cannot say plainly what happened to the wife or what the pill does, so the words keep sliding between meanings, as they might for anyone trying to talk around a loss.