Nine words, no punctuation, no verb: Dave Bonta's "Fulmination" gives almost nothing to hold, which is why the few things it does give feel so heavy. The poem works by collision. Two lines of bodily, slightly disgusting intimacy are followed by a sudden jump to the sky.
Start with the title, because it carries a lot. To fulminate is to thunder out a denunciation, and the word comes from the Latin for hurling lightning. It also has an explosive sense, since chemists speak of fulminates as compounds that detonate. Either way, the word promises violence and noise, and then the poem delivers something small and wet: "the received spit / of news in the mouth." Thunder has shrunk to saliva. That gap is the first joke, and it is a bitter one.
"Received" is the pivotal word. It is what we do with a message, but it also suggests received opinion, ideas handed down and accepted without testing. Pair it with "spit" and the news becomes something another mouth has already produced. The poem doesn't say whose, but a fulminating speaker, the kind who rants and sprays as he rants, is an obvious candidate, and that reading is my inference rather than something the poem states. The speaker has not gone looking for this. It has simply arrived, and it is now "in the mouth," where it can't easily be ignored. Taste is the most intimate of the senses and the hardest to keep out. The image suggests that news is never merely information we weigh at a distance. It gets into the body, and the body has to decide whether to swallow it or spit it back.
The grammar supports this. There is no "I," no action, no sentence to finish, only a noun phrase hanging in the air. The speaker is passive in just the way "received" implies: a mouth, a receptacle. The lines also shrink as they go. The first has four syllables, the second five, and the last just two. The poem tightens like a throat closing and then stops.
That last line, "War Moon," is where the poem turns. The capital letters make it look like a name or a title, and it echoes the old habit of naming full moons after what the season brings, such as a Harvest Moon or a Hunter's Moon. Here the moon has been renamed by the news. Whether the speaker is looking at a real moon or the phrase is a bitter coinage, the effect is the same: the sky, which should be indifferent and beautiful, now carries a label from the same source as the spit. Even the moon can't be looked at without the war coming along.
The sound of the poem holds this together. "News" and "Moon" share a long *oo*, so the word that ends the second line is answered, almost as an echo, by the word that closes the poem. "Mouth" and "Moon" share their opening *m*. Those quiet links join the body and the sky, and they suggest that what happens in the mouth and what hangs overhead are not as separate as they seem. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the vowels do the work a rhyme scheme would normally do.
Something else is left open, which is why the poem is hard to date or pin to a single conflict. "War" is never specified. No country, no side, no event appears, only the condition of receiving war-news and carrying its taste around. That makes the poem short, but not slight. It could be read in almost any decade in which people have learned about distant violence secondhand.
What makes "Fulmination" worth studying is how much it does with so little. It turns a familiar modern experience, absorbing the news, into something physical and faintly sickening. It lets the title's thunder collapse into spit and then lets the last line re-inflate it into something cosmic and ominous. And it ends without comfort. The poem doesn't tell us what to feel or what to do. It leaves the reader with the taste in the mouth and the strange new moon overhead.