"Imagine," the poem begins, and the command arrives before we have a chance to refuse. Dave Bonta's "Grieving process" is only six lines long, yet it asks something uncomfortable of the reader at once: to picture a man with his mouth around his own gun. The text never says who he is, or whether the speaker witnessed the scene or only reconstructs it. The opening word suggests the second. Grief here starts as the mind trying to build an image it cannot have seen and cannot stop seeing.
The first stanza is built from a few carefully chosen words. "His mouth / on his own gun" repeats the possessive, and "own" quietly stresses that the act is self-directed, a closed circuit with no other person in it. A mouth is the body's organ of speech, eating and kissing, and here it is occupied by metal, so the line is silent as well as violent. Then comes the simile, which is the poem's strangest and most memorable stroke: "like a dinner of absence." A dinner is domestic and shared, something that happens at a table at a set hour. Bonta serves it with nothing on the plate. The phrase works in two directions. The man seems to swallow absence, to feed on his own disappearance. But a dinner of absence is also what the survivors are left with: an empty chair, a meal that has lost its company. The line never chooses between these readings, and the lack of punctuation lets both stand.
The second stanza switches from imagining to doing. "I" enters for the first time, and the speaker's action is almost comically small: "I set my books in perfect order." The rhythm changes with it. The line falls into four steady beats (*set*, *books*, *per*-, *or*-), a measured tread after the image that came before. Ordering books is a displacement activity, the kind of task a person grabs when something enormous cannot be handled directly. Books are also where we usually go for explanations, consolation and reasons, and the speaker only arranges them, never opens them. "Perfect" is the sharpest word in the stanza. It is the opposite of what has happened, and it hints at how hard the speaker is gripping the only things still under control.
Then the last two lines, with their one carefully placed break: "and do not find any reason / to think." Read at the end of the line, "do not find any reason" sounds like the oldest question after a suicide, *why?*, with the answer withheld. The next line turns it. There is no reason *to think*, as if thought itself had lost its point. The speaker may not be able to explain the death, and may have stopped trying to explain anything. Because the poem ends without a full stop, it does not close. It trails off at the word "think," the one thing the speaker has stopped doing.
The poem uses no rhyme and no capital letters, and its two tercets are as plain as a diary note. That restraint is the point. A more ornate poem would risk making the death beautiful or the grief neat. Instead the form behaves like the speaker: spare, tidy on the surface, and withholding what is underneath.
The title may be the most pointed piece of writing in the poem. "Grieving process" sounds like a pamphlet or a list of stages, and it implies movement, with an arc running from shock to acceptance. What the poem actually shows is stalling: an image that will not leave, a pair of hands straightening shelves, a mind that has gone quiet. The gap between the clinical phrase and the lived moment is where the poem finds its force.
That is what makes it worth reading closely. In very few words it refuses the consoling story that grief is a process with a finish line. It also shows how grief can disguise itself as calm, or as housekeeping, and it does so by trusting a single strange simile and a single line break to carry what a longer poem might over-explain.