Try reading Dave Bonta's "Demonology" without shifting in your chair. The first line is a trap: "Speak of an itch & it will appear." By the time you reach the end of that sentence, the poem has already proved itself right. The itch is not only described but summoned, and the reader's own scalp or ankle becomes the evidence.
The title explains why this matters. A demonology is a study of demons, and the poem treats itching as a possession. The phrase "its names are legion" echoes the New Testament demon who answers, "My name is Legion, for we are many." Bonta's itches are just as many, and just as hard to drive out. The pun on "the devil is in the details" is hidden in plain sight, since the itch is "existing / mainly in the details." The poem also hints that naming and conjuring are one act. Reciting a list of demons is what an exorcist might do, but here the recital seems to call them up.
And what a list it is. For twenty-six lines the poem does almost nothing but pair body parts with the same word: "arm itch, thumb itch, / calf itch, back itch." There is no rhyme scheme and no regular meter, yet the repetition makes its own beat, a drumming monotony that is itself irritating. The hard "-itch" ending, with its clipped vowel and gritty "tch," sounds like fingernails on skin. Sound also does the organising. "Head itch, heel itch" and "nipple itch, nose itch" pair up through alliteration, while "muscle twitch" and "eyelid twitch" sneak in only because they rhyme with the refrain. They are not itches at all, which suggests the catalogue is held together less by logic than by the pull of the sound. The body parts jump about with no anatomical order, from "kneecap" to "behind-knee," from "eyebrow" to "buttock," so the itch seems to wander at random across the whole map of a person.
The list is also unembarrassed. "Foreskin itch," "anal itch," "clitoris itch" and "testicle itch" sit in the same flat tone as "elbow itch" and "palm itch." The effect is democratic and a little comic: nobody's body is exempt, and the reader's discomfort is part of the point. These are the itches we do not mention at dinner, and the poem lines them up beside the respectable ones as if they were equals.
Against this long run of short lines, the final stretch lands with surprising weight. "Even an amputee's missing part / can somehow itch, on the other side / of an unbridgeable absence." The rhythm slows, the lines stretch out, and the joke goes quiet. A phantom itch cannot be scratched because there is nothing there to scratch. Bonta's phrase "an unbridgeable absence" turns the comedy of the list into something close to grief.
The last three lines then pull the rug away. "It's a bait-&-switch" suggests that the itch lures us with the promise of relief and then delivers something else. "What we miss — we're convinced — / is simply the scratching." The dashes make the sentence hesitate, and the word "simply" sounds a little too easy. If the amputee is really missing the limb, not the scratching, then perhaps every itch is a small stand-in for some larger lack that we mistake for a manageable, fixable sensation. The poem gently suggests we grab at the nearest remedy because the real loss cannot be reached.
That double movement is what makes the poem worth reading. It begins as a playful trick on the reader's body and ends as a thought about desire and misrecognition: we want something, we name it wrongly, and the wrong name is easier to satisfy. Even the ampersands, in "itch & it" and "bait-&-switch," look like quick scribbles, as if the poem were written in haste, mid-scratch. In about thirty lines it makes us feel the problem physically before it asks us to think about it.