Dave Bonta's "Medicine Show (1)" brings us onto the deck of a slave ship without ever using the word "slave." It doesn't need to. The first mate with a wet cloth over his face, the ankles unlocked "20 at a time," the "rapidly declining stock" and the closing "going, going, gone" all tell us these are people being carried to market. The central idea is a hard one. The dancing the captors force on their prisoners is a cold piece of cargo maintenance, yet it becomes a place where memory survives in the body, and where that memory is also used up.
The title is bitterly ironic. A medicine show is normally a travelling entertainment where a showman sells cure-alls, and here the only "medicine" is exercise at the end of a whip. "You'll die if you don't start moving" sounds like a doctor's advice, but the concern is for property, not for people. The "(1)" hints that this may be one part of a longer sequence, though the poem alone cannot tell us that.
The poem is built from six unrhymed tercets in free verse, and its control comes from tone and sound. The opening lines are long and flat, almost a ship's log, matching the mate's routine. Then the language sharpens: "Now come the crackers, / now come the leather-tongued snakes." The repeated "now come" makes the whips arrive like acts in a show, and the second line turns the whip into a living thing with a tongue. The hard *k* sounds of "crackers," "claw," "croak" and "calabash" keep the poem sounding brittle and dry. The welts that "rise like anthills" are a quiet, disturbing simile. Swollen skin becomes small mounds, as if the wounds were something swarming and built up from below.
The poem also takes over the vocabulary of the traders and lets it condemn them. The captives are "stock," while the captors are defined only as "pink-faced men," a flush of colour with no individuality. The gaze is reversed, and the traders are reduced to one detail, as the captives have been.
The middle of the poem turns from the scene to the body. "Those with chained feet make music / for those with chained hands" describes a grim division of labour in which the restriction itself becomes rhythm. Then comes the poem's key claim: "half-atrophied as they are / the muscles remember / what the human being wills itself to forget." The poem never says exactly what is to be forgotten. It may be the humiliation, or it may be home, and the ambiguity helps. The compressed phrase "claw finger, hammer thumb" reads like a medical description of damaged hands, but it also sounds like tools or drumming gestures. Damage and skill are in the same body at once. "The firmness of a taut-skinned earth" blends a drumhead with the ground, and "taut-skinned" is hard to read without thinking of the dancers' own skin. Even "organized tromp of feet" works two ways: the whips impose order, but order is also what makes a collective rhythm.
The last stanza gathers everything. "Burden" is an old word for the refrain of a song, and also a weight, so the calabash carries both. The singers "croak" instead of sing, their voices dry and strained. Their refrain is the auctioneer's cry, "going, going, gone," and it is hard to tell whether the captives are singing it or the poem is laying it over their song. Either way, the music is already being absorbed into the sale. The final image, "Legs like flames on the savanna / flare & die," recalls a grass fire. It gives the dancers a moment of beauty, brings back the landscape they have been taken from, and ends on the word "die," which echoes the earlier warning on deck. The ampersand makes the flaring and dying almost one motion.
The poem is significant because it refuses comfort. It does not make the dance a simple act of defiance, and it does not let us hear it as quaint folk music. Dignity, memory and rhythm persist, but under compulsion, and the same pressure that reveals them is wearing them away. In eighteen short lines, it asks how much of a person's culture can be carried in the muscles when everything else has been taken.