Deep in the sea, where no sunlight reaches, a small light dangles above an angler fish's mouth, and Dave Bonta wants to know what happens if the fish ever notices it. The lure exists to fool other creatures, so could it fool its owner? A trap that might catch the one who set it is the poem's central idea, and it quickly grows from marine biology into a picture of appetite, self-deception and the things we carry with us that we cannot shake off.
The form matters here. The poem is one block of eleven lines made of three sentences, and every one of them is a question. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Sentences spill over the line breaks ("Does it ever stir / from whatever trance-like state / passes for sleep"), so the voice sounds like someone thinking aloud, half amused and half unsettled. The poem never answers, and the speaker doesn't pretend to know. Even the fish's sleep is hedged: "whatever trance-like state / passes for sleep" admits that human words are being borrowed for an animal whose inner life we can't see. The poem knows it is guessing, and that keeps the guesswork honest.
The poem is also playful with register. "Aphotic zone" is cold, scientific language, the sort found in a textbook. Then the poem drops into the voice of a cartoon, with "Ah — mine!" It is the only moment of direct thought and the only exclamation mark, a flash of pure greed. The dash works like a tiny intake of breath before the grab. The two ampersands add to the casual, quick feel, as though the speaker can't be bothered to write "and" while a fish is lunging. The lunge itself is built from sound: "stir" and "surge" share a sibilant movement out of stillness, and the long *a* in "agape" echoes "bait" and "state" from earlier lines, so the open mouth seems to open inside the poem's own vowels.
The comparison to "the proverbial donkey / tempted by a carrot" is a neat twist on a cliché. The word "proverbial" gives a small wink, admitting that this is a stock image. But the usual donkey has someone else holding the stick. The angler fish is both donkey and driver, and its carrot grows from its own head. Notice too that "tempted" appears in the first line and again at the start of line 8, so the poem circles back to the word like the fish circling its own light. In a zone defined by having no light, the only glow around is the fish's own, which makes temptation seem almost natural.
Then comes the turn: "Or does it get / snappish at its traveling companion." The fish may feel not greed but irritation. "Traveling companion" is a deliberately mild, almost genteel phrase for a glowing growth fixed to its face, and its politeness is funny because the companion can never be left behind. "Snappish" does its own work too, since the word itself snaps like jaws. The poem then stacks two similes: the lure is "persistent as a bad conscience, / haunting as the image of its own death." The feeling climbs from a nag to real dread.
Why death? The poem doesn't say, but judging by the imagery, the lure is the last thing any of the fish's prey ever sees. To the angler fish it is a tool, but to everything else it is a picture of what the fish is: something that kills. To see it clearly would be to see oneself as others see you, and the poem suggests that this is a haunting sight. The final line is the longest and ends on the heaviest word, "death," which the question mark can't quite close off.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It never mentions people, yet the questions fit us easily. We all have lures of our own, such as ambitions, habits and flattering stories, and we might be fooled by them or haunted by them. The poem leaves that thought for the reader to reach, and it is stronger for not spelling it out.