Six short lines, no punctuation, not even a capital letter to begin, and Dave Bonta's "Orality" still manages to unsettle the question of who is speaking. The title promises voice. Orality is the condition of language that lives in the mouth and ear rather than on the page. Yet the poem's images are things you can only see written down: "the letter i," "the word poor." That gap between a spoken world and a written one drives the poem. It asks what happens to a voice once it has been turned into marks, and where the mouth goes when we read in silence.
The first stanza makes a strange claim: "a thin mouth is a part / of all I discover." Wherever the speaker looks, a mouth seems to be involved, as if discovery arrives through naming, through someone's speech. "Thin" invites several readings at once. It could be pressed lips, a stingy or hungry look, or just a narrow opening. Then comes "who is making it," with no question mark and no clear antecedent for "it." Is the thing being made the mouth, the discovery, or the poem itself? Without punctuation the line can be a real question, a muttered aside, or a clause left hanging in mid-air.
The second stanza answers with comparisons, but they don't settle anything. "Thin as the letter i" is a visual image, a single upright stroke with a dot above it. It also echoes line two. The only capital in the poem is the speaker's "I," and the lowercase "i" is that self shrunk to its slimmest form. Judging by the placement, the poem may be hinting that the speaker, like the mouth, is a thin thing. Then "thin as the word poor" moves from shape to meaning. The word itself is oddly plump on the page, with its two round o's, and saying it pushes the lips into a rounded pout, the opposite of a thin mouth. So a word that looks full names a lack. Here thinness stops being a matter of appearance and becomes a matter of want.
That want is reinforced by the final line, "who desires it." Set beside "making" in line three, it gives the poem two verbs for the mouth's maker: one of creation, one of appetite. Orality can also suggest hunger, the mouth as the place where wanting happens, and "poor" and "desires" frame the second stanza in exactly that language. The mouth is thin because it is made, or because it is hungry, or perhaps both.
The poem has no rhyme, but it builds a pattern from sound. The narrow short *i* vowel runs through it: "thin," "is," "making," "it," "letter," "i." The sound of the poem is thin in the way it describes. Both tercets also end on a "who … it" construction, "who is making it" and "who desires it," and the repeated "it" works like a rhyme made of syntax rather than sound. The lines are brief and loosely measured, with two or three stresses each, and the closing lines are the shortest in the poem. The poem narrows as it goes, which suits its subject.
What makes it worth reading is how much it asks of so few words. It sets two unanswerable "who" clauses at the ends of its stanzas and leaves them open. It also makes the reader part of the puzzle. Try saying it aloud and your own mouth has to narrow for "thin" and "i," then round itself for "poor." In that moment, one possible answer to "who is making it" is the person reading. The poem is written, but it finishes its work only when someone gives it a voice, which is a quiet and clever way to make a poem about orality out of ink.