"Comestibles" is a fussy, slightly old-fashioned word for things to eat, the sort you might find on a shop sign. Dave Bonta's poem begins by promising a menu and then quietly rewrites it, until the food on the plate is hours, bad news, a body, a heart, and finally the speaker. Its central idea is that living is a form of consuming, and that consuming runs in both directions. The one who eats ends up diminished.
The opening couplet sets an unexpected scene: "death and I ate the hours / with full satisfaction." Death is not a looming figure at the door but a dining companion, sitting beside the speaker as an equal. Time becomes something to chew through and enjoy. "Full satisfaction" cuts two ways. It sounds like the contentment of a good meal, but it also belongs to the language of contracts and debts, where a claim is settled "in full satisfaction." Keep that second meaning in mind, because the last line returns to it.
The next two couplets keep the verb "ate" but let the objects drift further from food. The first meal is almost cheerful: "at a little place," a modest restaurant, a "six-discourse dinner." The poet has swapped "course" for "discourse," so the meal becomes six rounds of talk as well as six dishes. That small substitution suggests pleasure that is social and intellectual as well as physical. Then the scene moves indoors: "at home ate sad news." The verb now swallows an abstraction, and the poem slides from the way we say we "eat our words" into something more painful, where bad news has to be taken in and digested like any other meal. By the next line the grammar has stopped pausing: "ate a body ate a heart." With no comma between the two clauses, the line has a gobbling speed. The poem does not tell us whose body or heart these are, or whether they are literal, a memory of grief, or a bitter echo of religious ritual. That vagueness is deliberate, and the line is more disturbing because the speaker refuses to explain it.
The final couplet delivers the turn. After all this eating, what is left is "a thin piece of me likely / to contract." The word "thin" is a small shock, since someone who has eaten so heartily should be fuller, not thinner. Appetite has not nourished the speaker. It has used the speaker up. "Contract" is the poem's cleverest word, carrying at least three meanings at once: to shrink, to catch an illness, and to sign an agreement. The shrinking self, the vulnerable body and the bargain with death all fit, and they link back to "full satisfaction." The language of settled accounts returns, now with the speaker as the thing being paid out. The word "likely" adds a cool, almost actuarial tone, as if the speaker were reading odds rather than mourning.
The form makes these ideas feel natural. There are four couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. Nothing in the layout ranks one item above another, so hours, dinner, news, body and heart sit on the same flat plate, and the poem implies that all experience, pleasant or terrible, gets consumed the same way. The repeated "ate" does the work rhyme would normally do, a steady drumbeat that holds the poem together. Line breaks are used with care. Ending a line on "ate" in the second couplet leaves the verb hanging before its object arrives, and "likely / to contract" delays the crucial verb until the last possible moment. There is also quiet sound-play in the repeated s of "satisfaction," "six," "discourse" and "sad," which gives the lines a murmuring, table-talk texture.
The poem matters because it handles a huge subject, mortality, with almost no ornament and in a calm, conversational voice. It never wails or lectures. It lets one plain verb do all the work, stretching it from lunch to loss until the reader notices that the verb has quietly turned on the speaker. The poem is a useful reminder that the simplest word, repeated and pushed past its usual limits, can say more than a page of explanation.