Six short lines, no capital letters, not a single comma, and already a king has put a head on someone's workbench. Dave Bonta's "Fashion-forward" reads like an order slip from a tailor's shop, except that the thing being altered is a body part and the customer is a monarch. The poem is about how power asks for strange things, and how the people who serve it dress the result up as style.
The first stanza has no main verb. "A head to alter for the king / and a hand to set between us" are noun-plus-infinitive phrases, like items on a list of jobs. Nobody is shown doing anything. The tasks simply exist, handed down from above, and that gives the stanza a chilly, bureaucratic calm. "Alter" is the clever word here. It belongs to the vocabulary of hems and seams, yet a head altered for a king may make a reader think of something far more brutal. The poem never says so, which makes the suggestion more unsettling. The hand is stranger still. It is "set between us / like a used tool," as if it were put down on a table after work, or placed as a barrier between two people. The simile arrives in the shortest line of the poem, only four syllables, and its flatness does the damage. A hand that has been used and laid aside is no longer treated as part of a person.
Then the grammar changes. "We invent a new fashion" gives us the first real verb and the first pronoun that acts rather than waits. After the passive jobs of stanza one, people finally do something, and the "we" is telling. The speakers are not victims. They are makers, and they are implicated. What they make, though, is "good for nothing but / to silver over age." The line break after "but" works like a small drop: we expect a purpose and get a cosmetic one. The phrase also echoes the old insult "good-for-nothing," so the fashion is dismissed even as it is announced. "Silver" is a rich word to land on. It is the colour of aged hair, the backing of a mirror, the coating on cheap metal, and the material of coins. To silver over age is either to cover it with something that looks precious or to make age itself look like a luxury. Either way, only the surface changes.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no steady metre; the lines vary from eight syllables down to four and sit close to speech. But there are quiet echoes. "Head" and "hand" start alike, as if one were the other's neighbour on the body. The soft *-er* endings of "alter," "silver" and "over" run through the poem and link the king's first demand to the final cover-up. The consonants in "silver over age" are smooth and slippery, so the last line sounds like what it describes: a gloss.
The title adds another layer. "Fashion-forward" is the language of magazines and runways, a compliment for people who are ahead of the trend. Here it sounds ironic. The poem's "new" fashion looks backward, since it exists only to hide age, and it grows out of something as old as kings and their demands. The hyphen joins two words, much as the poem joins its two stanzas: the command in one, the cosmetic response in the other.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves for the reader to build. Because it gives no setting, no names and no explanation, it can be read as a small political fable about courtiers who make a style out of fear. It can also be read more privately, with "between us" as two people who share a damaged closeness and cover it with a pleasant finish. Both readings rest on the same sharp observation: people often survive what they cannot refuse by turning it into a look, and the shine can make the thing underneath harder to see.