Eighteen words, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a question with no question mark: Dave Bonta's "In the red" gives readers very little to hold, and that is where its force comes from. Its subject seems to be the moment when something hidden turns visible and dangerous, and its central idea is an uneasy one. When that moment comes, will writing warn us, or will it merely stand and watch?
The title does a lot of work before the poem begins. "In the red" is the language of accounts and debt, where red ink marks what is owed and what has gone wrong. It also hints at the other things red can mean: a flush, a wound, an alarm. The poem never settles on one of these. "Will we or others break / into sudden scarlet" borrows the pattern of phrases like "break into a sweat" or "break into song", where a person suddenly gives way to something. Here what we give way to is a colour. Because "break" is also what skin does when it is cut, the colour begins to look like blood, or at least like exposure. The sibilance of "sudden scarlet" makes the change quick and hissing, like a sharp breath. Notice, too, that the speaker says "we or others". The speaker doesn't stand outside the danger, and the "or" admits that no one can say who will be struck.
The second stanza turns from the body to the desk. "Like inks best for danger" is a compressed simile, and its grammar is loose enough to read in two ways. The scarlet might resemble the inks that are best suited to danger, the red used for warnings, corrections and alarms. Or it might be a grim kind of preference: red ink is the best ink when danger arrives. Either way, the picture of blood and the picture of ink run together, so that the breaking-open of a body starts to look like a page being marked. The final line, "where the pen stood by", is the poem's quiet sting. To "stand by" can mean to wait in readiness, as a lifeguard or a standby crew does. It can also mean to stand idly by while something happens. The pen is either poised to respond or guilty of doing nothing, and the poem refuses to say which.
The form supports that uncertainty. The poem is two short stanzas of two lines each. The lines run at six syllables each, then shrink to five in the last, so the poem seems to stop a little early, as though the pen had stopped too. There is no end rhyme, but the sounds still link the lines. The long "a" of "break" returns in "danger", tying the question of the first stanza to the warning of the second. The long "i" of "like" is echoed at the very end in "by", so the second stanza is bracketed by one vowel. The line break after "break" is also worth noticing. The word sits at the edge of the line, and the reader has to leap over a gap to reach "into", which acts out the sudden rupture the words describe. The missing punctuation lets the first stanza hang open, and the lowercase start makes the poem feel like a thought caught mid-flow rather than a finished statement.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it asks of so little. It takes a worn-out idiom and makes it strange again. It also quietly implicates the act of writing, and by extension the poem itself. If the pen was there when the scarlet appeared, then every writer, and every reader, has to ask what a pen is for in a moment of danger. Nothing in the text tells us what the danger is, whether personal, social or something more general. That openness works in the poem's favour, because it leaves readers to supply their own crisis. The poem gives them the red ink, and the question of whether to pick up the pen is left to them.