A man closes his door, and the world shrinks to a question about the weather. Dave Bonta's "Like the plague" is only nine short lines long, yet it holds fear, loneliness and a stubborn, unspoken hope. The speaker has "not left my house / in a year," avoids plague and war "like / an infected kiss," and ends by admitting he cannot say whether his heart will "sink or / to sing."
No date comes with the poem, so tying it to any particular event would be guesswork. Readers today may hear echoes of lockdown, but nothing in the text insists on it. What the text does give is a state of mind. Its central idea seems to be that isolation cuts a person off not only from danger but from knowledge of his own feelings. He doesn't know the weather outside, and he doesn't know the forecast inside his chest. A single "I do not know" serves both, because with no punctuation it can be read as "what weather we have, I do not know" or as "I do not know how likely is the heart…". The two ignorances run into each other.
That sliding is the poem's main technique. Take "in a year I will not / be killed by plague / or war." Read alone, it sounds like a promise about the future: within a year I won't be killed. But the line also finishes the previous sentence, "I have not left my house in a year." Past and future overlap, much as they do when every day looks the same. Staying in is both a fact and a strategy, since it is how he intends not to be killed. Because there are no commas or full stops, the reader has to decide where each thought ends, and often can't.
The line breaks add to the effect. Lines stop on weak, unfinished words: "I will not," "avoid them like," "sink or." Each break makes the reader wait for the rest, which suits a speaker who is also waiting. The lines are short, mostly five or six syllables, so the poem has a hushed, careful tone, like someone speaking quietly in a closed room. There is no rhyme and no capital letters apart from "I." The poem looks as bare as the life it describes.
The one real simile is the most striking image. "Avoid like the plague" is a well-worn idiom, and the poem hands that phrase to its title while the body offers something fresher: "an infected kiss." Plague and war are vast and impersonal, but a kiss is small and intimate. The comparison shrinks public catastrophe into a private gesture and shows what staying in costs. He is shunning touch as well as death. Sound supports the link, since hard k-sounds run through the poem ("left," "killed," "plague," "like," "infected," "kiss," "likely," "sink"), and "killed" and "kiss" sit close enough to suggest that desire and danger have become hard to tell apart.
The ending is the most carefully built part. "I do not know how likely / is the heart to sink or / to sing" turns ordinary word order upside down, so it sounds like a question without a question mark. "Likely" also echoes the earlier "like," so comparison gives way to probability. "Sink" and "sing" differ by a single letter, and that closeness makes the heart's two possible fates seem a hair's breadth apart. The poem also ends on "to sing," its shortest line, which lifts the poem slightly without answering the question.
The poem is significant for its restraint. It has no self-pity and no grand statement about fear. It records a narrow life and one honest uncertainty. Even the small word "we" in "what weather we have" matters, because it is the only plural in the poem. Shut in and unsure of his own heart, the speaker still counts himself among those who share the same sky.