Most of us have been told at a dinner table that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs: we have piled the plate higher than we can finish. Dave Bonta's "More-ish" picks up that scolding proverb, cuts off half of it, and turns what is left into something close to a blessing. In four short lines, greed becomes gratitude.
The title does the first piece of work. "Moreish" is the everyday word for food so good you keep reaching for another bite, and the hyphen here splits it so that we hear both halves. "More" is the appetite. "-ish" is the shrug, the small hedge that makes the wanting modest and almost sheepish. That tone, hungry but unembarrassed, carries through the whole poem.
The first stanza sets up a paradox: "my full hands find / something more." Hands that are already full should have no room left, yet they find more. The verb matters. The hands *find*; they do not grab or take. The greed is receptive, a matter of discovery. The sound of the first line also feels loaded. "Full hands find" is three heavy words in a row, with the f of "full" echoing in "find," so the line seems weighed down with what it carries. The second line shrinks to three syllables and a vague noun. "Something" is never named, and it could be fruit, a gift, a face or a view. What is found matters less than the fact that there is always more to find.
Then comes white space. The gap between "more" and "bigger" works as a small extra helping of silence before the poem goes on.
The second stanza is longer than the first, ten syllables against seven, so the poem physically grows as it nears the word "bigger." That line, "bigger than my eyes," is the proverb with its stomach removed. Without the stomach, the comparison no longer scolds. In the proverb the eyes are the organs that overreach. Here the found thing exceeds the eyes because it is too large to take in at a glance, which is a different kind of excess. It is not appetite outrunning capacity, but the world outrunning sight.
The last line, "the light in my eyes," has no punctuation to tell us how it connects to what came before. It could continue the list, so that the "something more" is bigger than the eyes and is also the light in them. Or it could be a new thought, in which the light in the eyes is what is bigger. The poem allows both readings. Either way, the eyes change from instruments of greed into instruments of gladness. Light is also what lets eyes see anything at all, so the "more" is both what is seen and what makes seeing possible.
The sound patterns tighten this idea. "Eyes" ends both lines of the second stanza, an identical rhyme that makes the poem loop back on itself, as if it wanted a second serving of its own word. The long *i* sound runs through "my," "find," "eyes," "light," "eyes," giving the poem a brightness that matches its final image. The possessive "my" appears three times, but "I" never does. The speaker is present only as hands and eyes, the body's two ways of taking in the world, one by grasping and the other by looking. There is no regular metre, and there are no capitals or full stop, so the poem ends open and trails off into light like the appetite it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by leaving things out. It drops one word from a familiar saying and so reverses its moral. It withholds the noun, so that any reader can fill in their own "something." It gives a quiet defence of wanting more, not more possessions but more attention, more wonder, more to see. In a few lines it suggests that a person with full hands can still be glad to find the next thing.