Fourteen words, two sentences, and a whole modern anxiety folded inside them. Dave Bonta's "Call/response" sets up an exchange that ought to be simple, someone asks and someone answers, and then watches it collapse into a double nothing. The survey "is asking nothing," and the speaker will "answer nothing." The poem is more than a joke about pointless questionnaires because of its last line, where the speaker admits a motive: "for fear / of it being me."
The title already contains the poem's shape. Call and response is the pattern of one voice offering a line and another voice answering it, as in a chant or a song. The slash between the words both joins and divides them, like a pair of partners or like the stroke in a form field. Inside the poem the pattern is hollowed out. The call is empty and the response is empty, yet they match almost perfectly. "Asking" is answered by "answer," two words that open on the same short vowel, and "nothing" is answered by "nothing." The exchange fails in content but succeeds in symmetry, which is faintly eerie. It sounds like conversation without anyone actually talking.
"Asking nothing" is slippery in a useful way. It could mean the survey poses no real question, or that it wants nothing from us, or that it is inquiring about nothing at all. A survey is supposed to be the most specific kind of request, a list of boxes to tick, so one that asks nothing is a contradiction. The poem leaves that unexplained, and the strangeness does the work.
The turn comes in the second stanza, and the line break controls it. "I answer nothing for fear" stops on "fear," so for a moment the word stands alone, an emotion with no object. Only then does the next line supply one, and the object is oddly blank: "of it being me." The pronoun "it" has no fixed referent. If "it" is the nothing, the speaker fears that they are nothing, or that an empty answer would expose an empty self. If "it" is the answer, the fear is that any reply would be a self-portrait. If "it" is the survey, the fear is that the question, however vacant, is secretly aimed at the speaker. Judging by the text alone, the poem refuses to choose, and each reading is plausible. Together they suggest that being asked, even about nothing, makes a person feel found.
The poem's small-scale craft supports this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the first line begins in lowercase, so the only capital in the body of the poem is "I," a lone upright figure among the shrugging lines. Counting syllables gives roughly three, five, seven, five. The lines swell as the speaker gets drawn in, then shrink back on the closing line, like someone who leans toward the question and then retreats. The last stretch also gathers a thin, high sound: "fear," "being," "me" all hold a long *ee*, which tightens the voice just where the confession lands. The poem ends on "me," the smallest and most exposed word available. There is almost no concrete imagery, and the survey is the only object in sight. All of the poem's abstraction (asking, answering, nothing) is set against that one personal pronoun, so "me" feels like the only solid thing in the poem.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it turns a familiar situation inside out. Most of us worry that we will have nothing to say when questioned. Here the worry is that the nothing might be who we are, or that answering at all would turn a person into a respondent, a data point, a "me" someone can locate. The poem also contains a quiet paradox. The speaker claims to answer nothing, yet the poem is itself an answer, a reply to the survey made in the only form the speaker trusts, which is compressed, indirect and unsigned by any real disclosure. In fourteen words it withholds and confesses at once, and the white space around the lines carries the silence it describes.