Twelve words, four lines, and a title that does half the work. Dave Bonta's "(W)hole" is about appetite, but a strange kind: the speaker eats not to be nourished or even pleased, but to disappear.
The trick starts in the grammar. "I go to fat" has the shape of phrases like "go to seed" or "go to waste", idioms of decline, with "run to fat" as the nearest relative. Fat here is less something the speaker gains than a place they travel toward. Then "dine to lose me" repeats the little word "to" and changes its job. The first "to" marks a destination, the second introduces a purpose. The speaker moves toward fat, and does so on purpose. That purpose is the poem's first trap. Dieting language trains us to expect "lose weight", but what the speaker wants to shed is the self. "Me" is a small, bare word, not the weightier "myself", as if the self were something light and easy to mislay. And "dine" is only a letter away from "die". The ear half-catches the echo, and the poem seems to flirt with it.
The last two lines reverse the logic. If I lose myself, surely there should be less of me. Instead the speaker says "and increase / the whole", and two readings open. In the first, "the whole" means the totality: the self dissolves into something larger, the way food becomes the eater and the eater in time becomes food. Losing "me" is a gain for everything else. Read aloud, though, "the whole" is indistinguishable from "the hole", and the title makes the pun visible by putting the W in parentheses. Now the meaning darkens. Eating meant to fill an emptiness only makes it bigger. The poem never chooses between these readings. It lets fullness and emptiness share one sound.
The construction supports this. The lines run four syllables, four, three, two, so the poem narrows as it speaks of growth. The shape on the page thins out while the claim is expansion, and the words shrink toward a hollow. The line break matters too. "And increase" hangs alone for a moment, almost as a command or an intransitive verb, before "the whole" arrives as its object and tips the meaning.
There is no end rhyme, but the sound is carefully tied together. "Go" opens the poem and "whole" closes it on the same long o, a vowel that even looks like a zero or a hole, so the poem begins and ends in the same round shape. "Me" at the end of line two shares its vowel with "increase" in line three, so the lost self is quietly carried into the growth. "I" and "dine" chime too, linking the speaker to the act of eating. The text has no punctuation and no capitals except the pronoun "I", so the lines slide into one another like a single swallowed breath. The poem sounds half like a confession and half like a formula.
The only punctuation is in the title, and it is the cleverest touch. The parentheses fence off the W as something set aside, a letter that can be dropped. Take it away and "whole" becomes "hole". In miniature, the title does what the speaker says they want to do: lose a part of the self and find a gap where it was. The eye needs the title to see the pun, while the ear gets it free in the last line, so the poem works in two registers at once.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It does not lecture about consumption, the self, or the longing to be emptied and filled at once. It lets one pun carry the whole argument, and in doing so shows how wordplay can be serious. A reader can walk away with a mystical idea of the self merging into the world, or a bleaker one of hunger that feeds on itself. The poem is built so that both stay true.