Three short stanzas, no punctuation, no capital letters, and by the end a woman has cut off her own breast. Dave Bonta's "Exigencies" is only about twenty words long, yet it makes a sharp claim: much of what we call urgent necessity is really convenience, and we pay for it with the things that matter most. The title promises pressing demands, the kind that leave no choice. The last line, "out of convenience," quietly takes that excuse apart.
The opening stanza is deliberately hard to pin down. "time is too great / to make use of" can be read in several ways. Time may be too vast for us to use. It may be too grand and too precious to be treated as a resource. Or there may simply be too much of it. The line break helps. "time is too great" stands as a complete statement before "to make use of" trails in like an afterthought, so the idea of usefulness seems to arrive late and from outside. The phrase "make use of" also sets up the key verb of the poem. In the next stanza the speaker says "making honey," so the poem is already thinking about production and what it costs.
That second stanza is the poem's turning point, and its central image is odd and beautiful. "hived in glass" suggests bees in an observation hive, watched, enclosed, and busy. "Hived" is a clever verb because it turns a noun into a condition, something done to you. The address to "you" pulls the reader into the glass. The warning is gentle and hedged: "you may be making honey / not love." Honey is sweet and valuable, and it is also a product. The bees make it because they must, not because they choose. The poem sets this against love, which cannot be manufactured on a schedule. The phrase "not love" is the shortest line so far, and the blunt pause after it feels like a door closing. Judging by the imagery, the glass could stand for any transparent, efficient setting in which we are always visible and always producing, though the poem never says which.
Then comes the jolt. "a beautiful woman / cut off her own breast / out of convenience." Nothing prepares us for it, and the flat tone makes it worse. There is no explanation and no exclamation, only a plain report. Each word adds something. "Beautiful" suggests what is being given up. "Her own" insists that she does it to herself and no one forces her. And "convenience" removes any excuse of illness or tragedy, so the act reads as a choice made for ease. It is hard not to connect the breast with the honey of the previous stanza. Both are nourishing substances, and both belong to the poem's thinking about love and care, though that link is an inference rather than something the text states. If honey stands for what we produce while enclosed in the hive, the breast stands for what we might give instead, and the woman has traded it away.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme, but there are quiet echoes. "Make use of" returns as "making honey," and "of" faintly chimes with "love," so the end of the first stanza and the end of the second seem to touch across the gap. The lines are short and mostly built from plain one-syllable words: "hived in glass," "cut off her own breast." Against these, the three Latinate, many-syllabled words, "Exigencies" and "convenience" above all, sound smooth and administrative. They frame the poem like official language wrapped around something violent. The closing word is the longest and softest in the poem, and it is also the one that does the damage.
What makes "Exigencies" worth reading is how much it trusts the reader. It states no moral, offers no rescuer, and never says who the woman is or what "convenience" has bought her. It moves from the abstract (time) to the metaphorical (the hive) to the bodily (the breast), and each step brings the cost closer. By the end, the vague talk of being "too busy" has become something we can picture and cannot shrug off. The poem leaves the question open: when we say we have no choice, how often do we actually mean that it was easier?