Six short lines, and a title that sounds like a classroom: a teacher reading names from a register, pupils answering one by one. Dave Bonta's "Roll call" builds a whole adolescent world out of that ordinary ritual. Its central idea is that school is where young people first come near the idea of nothingness, and that the poem's only answer to it is the sound of fragile voices saying who they are.
The opening couplet works by swerve. "In school we grow close" sounds warm, even sentimental, like a line about friendship or about growing up together. Then the line break drops us into "to the void." The word "grow" matters here, because it suggests a slow, natural process, as if closeness to emptiness were just another thing that comes with age, like height. The shortest line in the poem, "to the void," is also the one with the least to stand on. The poem tells us how large the subject is by giving it so little space.
The second couplet is the strangest, and its grammar is deliberately slippery. With no punctuation, "here is a strange thing / to not desire to be" can be read several ways. The strange thing may be not wanting to exist at all. It may be that the very absence of desire is odd. Or it may be a puzzled observation about a kind of person one would rather not be. The phrase also faintly recalls Hamlet's "to be or not to be," though here the question has gone flat and quiet, with no soliloquy, just a bewildered "strange thing." That understatement is chilling. The speaker doesn't dramatise despair but notes it, the way a teenager might. And "here" does double work. It is the word a pupil says when their name is called, so a reply to the roll hides inside a line about not wanting to be. The poem lets the reader hear both at once.
The final couplet turns from abstraction to sound. "Boys sing their names / with broken voices." The images are physical: breaking voices are the audible sign of puberty, when a boy's speech cracks between registers. But "broken" carries a second meaning of damage, and the poem doesn't choose between them. The verb is just as telling. The boys "sing" their names rather than say or shout them, so attendance turns into something like a chant or a plaintive hymn. A roll call can also be a list of the lost, and the word picks up that undertone without the poem ever mentioning death.
The sounds knit the poem together quietly. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short, mostly four or five syllables with two or three stresses each, so the poem moves in small breaths. But the vowel in "void" returns in "boys" and "voices," and that matters. The word for emptiness and the word for human sound share a root of noise, as if the voice were already hiding inside the void. The soft *b* of "boys" and "broken" adds a gentle thud to the last lines, and the *n* of "names" and "strange" ties the final stanza back to the second. Lowercase letters and the absence of full stops keep everything tentative. Nothing is declared or concluded, and the three couplets simply stand side by side.
The poem moves from the abstract ("void," "desire," "to be") to the concrete ("boys," "names," "voices"). This is where its force lies. It never says that the voices defeat the void, and it doesn't claim they fail either. It only observes that when a name is called, a cracked and uncertain voice answers. Saying one's name aloud is the smallest proof of being, and the poem makes it sound both brave and breakable.
That is what makes "Roll call" worth reading closely. In about two dozen words it holds an institution, a stage of life, and a dark philosophical question, and it declines to explain any of them. The reader has to do the work, hearing "here" in one line and the cracking voices in another, and deciding how much hope the ending carries.