Hunger usually ends when you eat. Dave Bonta's "Gastric" begins at the point where it doesn't. In two short couplets it describes an appetite that has stopped being a bodily need and become a kind of engine, and then, in a quick swerve, it hands that engine to all of us.
The first couplet is built on a trap of repetition. "More" ends both lines, so the poem's only rhyme is a word rhyming with itself. The sound refuses to move on, just as the stomach does. Read slowly, the logic tightens: the stomach is "desiring more," and then "continues to have more." You might expect having to cancel out desiring. Instead the second line sounds like a continuation of the first, as if getting were simply fuel for wanting. The phrasing is slippery, too. Does the stomach keep receiving more food, or keep accumulating more desire? The grammar allows both, and that ambiguity is the point, because in this body satisfaction and craving are the same substance. The verb "continues" adds a flat persistence, a process running on without anyone deciding it should.
The register is worth noticing. The title, "Gastric," is a clinical word, the language of doctors and diagnoses, yet the first line says "my stomach," which is possessive and intimate. The speaker owns this organ without seeming to control it. It is the stomach that desires, not the person. Longer, more formal words like "desiring" and "continues" give the opening a detached sound, as though someone were describing a mechanism from the outside.
Then the second stanza turns. The pronoun jumps from "my" to "we," and the vocabulary shrinks to plain monosyllables: *moth, light, come*. By my count the lines also shorten as the poem goes, from seven syllables to six, then five, then five, so the whole thing narrows like a funnel, or a throat. The simile is compressed too. There is no "like" or "as a," only "moth to light." We aren't compared to moths; we simply arrive as moths. The moth drawn to a flame is a familiar image of compulsion, a pull that makes no sense in practical terms and can be dangerous. But look at what it does to the idea of hunger. Light cannot be eaten. A moth wants to reach it, not swallow it. By placing this image in a poem about the stomach, Bonta blurs wanting to see, wanting to reach and wanting to consume. Appetite is no longer confined to one organ. It is in the eyes and in the flight path.
The final line, "to take it all up," stays open. "Take up" can mean to absorb, to pick up, to occupy (as in "take up space"), or to adopt as a cause. "It" has no named referent. It could be food, light, or the world, and that vagueness lets the greed spread. "All" also quietly answers the "more" of the first couplet. More is endless, but all is a limit, and the poem suggests we are aiming for it anyway. There is no punctuation and no full stop, and the poem ends on "up," a small directional word that leaves us mid-gesture rather than at a verdict. We never see what happens to the moth, so the reader supplies the ending.
What makes the poem worth remembering is its economy and its refusal to preach. It never says that greed is bad or names what is being consumed. Readers might hear personal craving, modern consumption, or something about how much of the world humans try to absorb, but the poem commits to none of these. Instead it makes a quiet, unsettling move from a single stomach to a collective "we," turning a private sensation into a shared condition. In about twenty words it makes hunger feel like something we are carried along by, and the cool word "Gastric" at the top makes that feel less like a confession than a finding.