Dave Bonta's "Chemistry" reads like the aftermath of a close relationship, yet it never says love, loss or goodbye. It borrows the vocabulary of medicine and science (apothecaries, physician, appointment, heart) and uses it to talk about feeling. The central idea, as I read it, is that when two people reach the end of something, neither understanding nor language can cure it. All that is left is a physical act, a gesture of closure.
The title does a lot of work. "Chemistry" is the science of substances and also the everyday word for attraction between people. The first couplet holds both meanings: "between two apothecaries / the chemistry is charged." Apothecaries are old-fashioned dispensers of remedies, so these two people are supposed to be healers, and the poem hints that they cannot heal each other. "Charged" is also double. It can mean electrically charged, emotionally tense, or even accused. The spelling of "chemistry" and "charged" begins the same way, but the two words start with different sounds, a small mismatch that suits two people who are close and still don't quite fit.
The second couplet turns doubtful. "language might not be a physician / at some appointment." The phrasing is tentative: "might not be," "some appointment." The speaker doesn't announce that words fail, only that they may. "Appointment" also hovers between a doctor's visit and a meeting of two people, so the conversation between them becomes a consultation in which nobody has the right treatment. The poem is made of language and is admitting how little language can do.
The third couplet is the emotional centre: "we come to no agreement on the heart / to part with it or not." Here the medical imagery sharpens. "The heart" is an organ, something you might remove or donate, and also the seat of feeling. "Part with it" means to give something up, and it contains "part" in the sense of separating. Heart and part also rhyme perfectly, but the rhyme is buried across a line break, so it sounds more like an echo than a flourish. The poem has no regular rhyme scheme, and this quiet chime stands out because of that. Notice too the first-person plural. "We" are still together in the grammar, and still disagreeing.
Then the pronoun changes. In the final couplet it is "I cut off my hair / as everything that is over." After the cool, almost clinical abstractions, the poem lands on a concrete, bodily act. The small word "as" leaves the meaning open. The haircut could happen at the same moment as the ending, or because of it, or as a symbol of it. Cutting hair is a gesture many people associate with starting over or marking a loss, and the poem trusts that association without explaining it. The shift from "two" to "we" to "I" also traces the relationship coming apart. By the last line the speaker stands alone.
The form supports this quiet movement. There are four unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short and conversational. Without full stops, each statement drifts into the next, as if the speaker were thinking aloud rather than composing a verdict. The rhythm is uneven, a longer line followed by a shorter one, which gives the poem a hesitant, breathing quality. The couplets suggest pairs, and every pair is a pair of lines that never quite settles into agreement, like the people in it.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never tells us who left, who was wrong or what happened, and it avoids sentimental words entirely. Instead it lets a handful of double meanings (chemistry, charged, appointment, part) carry the feeling, so that readers supply their own story. For students, it is a good example of how compression works in poetry. Very few words can hold a whole situation if each one is doing two jobs, and the ending hits hardest because it stops explaining and simply acts.