Five lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and already tomorrow has failed to arrive. Dave Bonta's "Post mortem" imagines the dead from the inside, lying in their box while time carries on elsewhere. Its central idea is that death is both comic and unbearable, and that the only thing able to answer it is the face of someone loved.
The title gives two ways in. "Post mortem" means "after death", but it is also the name for the examination of a body. The poem takes up that second sense and works like a report on a corpse, noting where it lies, what it is good for, how it is stored, how it looks. The report comes in a deadpan voice, which is where the dark humour lives. "Who are without doubt a poor dinner" sounds like a verdict in a ledger, and the dead, we are told, would make a disappointing meal. The joke only works because it quietly assumes something is waiting to eat us. The phrase "without doubt" adds to the effect. The speaker is oddly sure of themselves for someone who has just died.
The first line holds the poem's best ambiguity. "Tomorrow missed us" can mean tomorrow failed to reach us, the way a shot misses its target. It can also mean tomorrow felt our absence, the way you miss a friend. Either way, the future is treated as a person who turns up at the wrong address. The verb "lie" works twice as well. It describes bodies lying down, but it also hints at falsehood, a hint the fourth line picks up when it calls the speaker's rest "counterfeit sleep". Sleep is the usual comfort word for death, and the poem refuses it, as if the dead were passing off a forgery. The adjective "strange" in "strange hair" fits this. Judging by the imagery, the body has been made presentable by other hands and no longer quite looks like the person who owned it.
The most striking image is the third line: "in a box like letters from death". It can be read in two ways. The dead are boxed up like letters, filed and kept. Or the letters are messages sent by death itself, and we are the ones holding them. The comparison also makes the dead seem to be waiting to be opened and read, though the poem never says whether anyone will do it. A coffin and a shoebox of old correspondence look alike on the page, and that is part of the effect.
The poem's rhythm is plain and almost steady. Four of the five lines run to eight syllables, and only the second stretches to nine, as though "a poor dinner" cannot quite be squeezed into the pattern. There is no rhyme, so nothing clicks shut at the end of a line. The missing punctuation means the lines can lean on one another. The relative "who" in line two hangs loosely from "us" or "we", and the grammar never fully settles. Sound does some quiet work, too. The hissing of "counterfeit sleep" and "strange" gives line four a whispering quality, while the last line slows down on its long vowels: "face", "same", "face", "soul".
That last line changes the poem. Until now the speaker has been wry and detached, listing the body's indignities. Then "her" appears, without introduction, and the register shifts: "her face the same face as my soul". We are not told who she is, and the poem suggests rather than states that she is someone dearly loved, perhaps one of the "us" of the first line. The repeated word "face" matters here. After four lines of objects (box, hair, dinner), the poem ends on a living human feature, and it claims that this face and the speaker's soul are identical. The soul, which the poem has avoided mentioning, turns out to look like another person.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in so little space. It declines both the solemn elegy and the easy consolation, using jokes and cold observation instead, and then lets sincerity break through only in the final line. That timing is the point. The humour has not been a way of avoiding feeling. It has been a way of holding it until the poem could no longer hold it back.