Four short lines, no punctuation, and a title that does much of the work: Dave Bonta's "Alewife" is a poem you finish yourself. An alewife was traditionally a woman who brewed or sold ale, so the title quietly puts a person behind the bar. The poem never describes her. It gives two couplets, one about conflict and one about kissing, and lets the reader decide how closely they belong together.
The first couplet sets the stakes: "our private war / like dwelling in fire." The word "private" shrinks war, which is normally public and loud, into something hidden between two people. The simile that follows is stranger than it first looks. "Dwelling" is a homely word, a word for settling in and staying. Fire is what destroys homes. To dwell in fire is to make a life inside something that should consume you, and the phrase suggests that the quarrel is no longer an event but a place the speaker lives. Nothing says whether the war is with a lover or with drink, and the poem seems content to leave both possibilities open. A reader could also hear a faint link to the heat of brewing and the burn of strong alcohol, though that is an inference rather than anything the text states.
The second couplet turns from the abstract to the physical: "lips that I have kissed / as much as some ales." The grammar is loose here, and the looseness is the interesting part. The sentence has no main verb and ends on a comparison that is never completed. It might mean the speaker has kissed these lips as often as he has kissed ales, or that the lips are as intoxicating as certain ales. Either way, drinking becomes a kind of kissing, which is easy to believe once you remember that a glass has a lip too. The casual phrase "some ales" sounds like pub talk, as if the speaker were sorting the good pints from the bad. That sorting hints at a rueful honesty. Some ales are bitter, strong, and regretted but ordered again, and the lips may be the same.
Notice also the shift pronoun. The first couplet says "our," and the second says "I." The war is shared, but the kissing is the speaker's own confession, and the poem moves from a joint predicament to a personal admission.
The construction is tightly controlled. Each line has only four or five syllables (depending on whether you say "fire" in one beat or two), so the poem reads almost like a haiku, though it follows no fixed pattern. There is no rhyme, no capital letters, and no connecting words such as "and" or "because." The couplets sit side by side, and the reader has to build the bridge. The sound does subtle work, too. The soft *l* runs through "like," "dwelling," "lips," and "ales," while the hissing *s* of "kissed / as much as some ales" gives the ending a slow, lingering feel, like something poured or something burning down. The plural "ales" lets the poem trail off rather than close, as if the thought continues after the words stop. The first couplet is hard and dramatic, with "war" and "fire," and the second is soft and sensory, with "lips" and "kissed." The poem implies that both can ruin you.
That blur is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses to say whether love is a war, whether drink is a lover, or whether the alewife is a woman, a habit, or both at once. Desire and appetite are shown as pleasure and harm together, with no lesson attached. In under twenty words, it gives you a title, a metaphor, and a half-finished comparison, and trusts you to supply the rest. A poem this small can feel slight at first, but it gets its force from what it leaves unsaid.